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If
you want
to get
to
your indomitable self
don’t
follow
the obvious roads!
(“The Coastal Road”)

If poets and their art provide us with tools necessary for living, then Mahmoud Darwish may be the hammer and chisel in poetry’s chest, feared by some for his capacity to tear down the walls of comfortable myths, and lauded by others for his ability to carve a crystalline beauty from the Alhambraic stones of the amorphous present. His most recent book in translation, Butterfly’s Burden (2007), which we had the honor to publish at Copper Canyon Press, evidences a poet who to the end was uncompromising in his faith that language might hold good, that it can hold its own against the forces that seek to dehumanize nations, and that independence resides in the individual, “indomitable self.” His later poems seem to demonstrate not only a resistance to forces at work against the Palestinian people and their culture, but also a resistance to the attempts at pigeonholing him as a symbol for the Palestinian cause. These poems stand in opposition to being mischaracterized in the binary terms convenient to political rhetoricians. Throughout his life Darwish avoided the obvious roads, including their bridges.