By turns lyrical and meditative, playful and ironic, imbued with exile and loss, and steadfastly truthful, the pieces in this collection were mostly written in Ramallah during the summer of 2006, as Israel invaded Lebanon. By juxtaposing fully-worked poems, journal entries, poetic fragments and prose poems Darwish blurs the boundaries between forms. In the final entry he writes, “All prose here is primitive poetry lacking a skilled craftsman, and all the poetry is prose accessible to passers-by.” A fitting farewell to a writer regarded as the voice of the Palestinian people and one of the greatest poets of our time. AS
Saqi Books; 2009; 165 pages
Red Reads 