Darwish: Poems

The first collection of Mahmoud Darwish's poems from across all periods of his life, highlighting the breadth, depth, and evolution of the beloved writer known as Palestine's national poet

In this sumptuous, expansive new collection -- featuring new translations, for the first time, into English of significant poems from the 1960s to 1980s -- Mahmoud Darwish's full scope as a poet, Palestinian, political asylee, and renderer of worlds is finally on full display.

Darwish's poems have been scattered by the winds, the result of a life of exile spanning from Galilee to Paris to Beirut and Cairo and his eventual final destination: Houston, Texas. Never before have his works been so thoroughly assembled in one place, and so thoroughly refreshed via unseen translations, as in this collection, compiled and edited by writers, professors, and scholars of Palestine, Hannah Lillith Assadi and Omar Khalifah.

Darwish was a master of Arab poetics and modernist methods, and in combining these influences, he created poetry of intense beauty and resonant music, and is forever read and treasured around the Middle East as a source of comfort and pride. Even now, nearly two decades after his passing, he remains an icon: There is graffiti across the Middle East and in Palestine of lines of his poems, his face. In his verses, everyone who has ever been dispossessed or displaced found a voice that spoke to them. In Darwish's poem, they found a home.

He was not solely a poet of resistance, however. Palestinians "cannot be defined by our relationship, positive or negative, to Israel. We have our own identity," he told Raja Shehadeh in an early 2000s interview. Here, in these fifty spectacular poems, is a range of expression that proceeds from that identity: love poems, lyrics, observations of nature, epically structured myths, and his famous diaries of life under siege, of life looking at the stars.MAHMOUD DARWISH was born in 1941 in Galilee, Palestine. His family was exiled from their home in the 1948 Nakba; they were considered "internal refugees" and were never granted Israeli citizenship. Darwish studied in Moscow and worked for literary magazines and newspapers in Cairo, Beirut, and Paris. He is the author of over thirty books of poetry and eight books of prose, and earned the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, the Lenin Peace Prize, and the Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal from France. Darwish died in 2008 in Houston, Texas.

For poetry readers, particularly appreciators of translation and diasporic themes; for those urgently called by the genocide in Palestine, many of whom have been educated in the last decade by Palestinian literature; for anyone looking for more Palestinian art.