The translator from the Arabic, Fady Joudah, compiled three of Darwish’s books in this collection: The Stranger’s Bed, A State of Siege, and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done. Yet, to my ear, some of these poems seem lost in translation, foundering in their gentility, courtly gestures, and spiritualism. Best known as the poet of Palestinian resistance, Mahmoud Darwish has a poetic range far wider than his politics. It is quite likely that Darwish’s poems pull deeply from the well of the love poetry of the Jahili (pre-Islamic) and Sufi traditions, rich in symbols and metaphors.

Exile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is “a mind of winter” in which the pathos of the summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable. By reshaping ancient stories, Darwish has attempted to form a bridge between cultures, so that a new version of an old story becomes “a counter-text, a kind of replacement of the original text by a new understanding, thus enabling the reader to confront the canon of the ‘other’ with a newly established or newly affirmed canon of his own. The existence of alternatives is not merely desirable but necessary: both philosophical and political fact. The majority focuses on the human being, on our hopes and fears, our essence, rather than on the horrible things we can do to one another. Though the love poems hovered just out of my grasp, A State of Siege insinuated itself right in my gut.A sense of intrinsic mutability becomes not the fear of death, but an engine for survival: "On my ruins the shadow sprouts green". Though many poems in the collection allude to the Israeli occupation of Palestine—or rather, to its consequences—most are not overtly political. But Darwish’s weaving together of selves is not the divine one of the Sufis: rather, it has to do with an irreparable loss of self, and with a yearning for an undefined, and perhaps indefinable, other, who at times seems long lost, at times, just within the poet’s reach. This most public of Palestinians is the master not of reductive polemic but of a profoundly lyric imagination, one that draws together the textures of daily life, physical beauty - whether of landscape or of women - longing, myth and history. Unlike Hamas, which seeks the destruction of Israel, Darwish apparently advocates “Israeli and Palestinian coexistence in a binational state with equal rights and secular citizenship.

The images and characters are those of war and siege: tanks, guns, bombs, soldiers, martyrs, guards, and mothers grieving for their sons. The result is a collection of poems that reads as one would ‘read’ a butterfly’s wings; what one encounters is elusive, heart-breaking, wistful, yet hopeful. He is the author of To See the Earth (2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007), Instants (chap, 2006), Primer for Non-Native Speakers (chap, 2004), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004), and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2003). For publishing and reading his poetry, he suffered house arrests and imprisonment, until his self-imposed exile to Egypt in 1970.It is also a fragmented diaristic rumination of the psychology of siege — the siege of bodies and consciousness alike.

Yet he bears across the often dizzyingly complex linguistic, poetic, and cultural associations embedded in Darwish’s poetry into an increasingly satisfying and, at times, breath-taking poetry. Because reality is an ongoing text, lovely / white, without malady", as A State of Siege (2002), a book-length poem of the second intifada, points out. Perhaps Darwish’s poetry is best described by a line from “Maybe, Because Winter Is Late”: “a guitar that has opened its wound to the moon. The motifs and concerns of his work seen here — the position of exile, the longing for a lost land, the haunting past, the quest for identity — merge in Don’t Apologize with a confrontation with mortality and the final erasure that it promises. Poetry is the closest thing to granting a sense of belonging for the poetic voice that poses it as a question.In some poems, Darwish adopts the persona of a female narrator, as in “Housework,” saying, “A rain made me wet and filled with the scent of oranges.

In half-remembered, half-poeticised dialogue, Ritsos tells the newly exiled Darwish: "It is the mysterious incident, poetry, / my friend, is that inexplicable longing / that makes a thing into a specter, and / makes a specter into a thing. In Mahmoud Darwish, Exile’s Poet, fourteen essays examine both his work and how an existential if not permanent exile is woven, if barely, with dangling threads of hope. It summons many different voices — the voices of the neutral, the voices of the outraged, the voices of future bombers, the voices of victims — and each slips into the next in such quick passages that following the poem is something like chasing someone running through a labyrinth.But there just isn’t much smell of the human in these poems — or just a bit too much jasmine, almond blossoms, butterflies, and freedom. Indeed, the extraordinary plasticity of Darwish's imagery allows him to create a continual interplay between the figures of home and beloved, presence and absence: "[. From the courtly and ecstatic love lyrics of The Stranger’s Bed, to the diaristic and penetrating political poem of A State of Siege, to the colloquial meditations on mortality, history, and the future in Don’t Apologize, The Butterfly’s Burden bears witness to the generous breadth of Darwish’s poetic and cultural achievement. Rather, Mahmoud Darwish is one who often contemplates, and questions, through a myriad of thoughts and images, what it means to be in a state of exile, and what it does to one’s identity.