Kate Daniels reviews Mahmoud Darwish's A River Dies of Thirst: Diaries

Kate Daniels reviews A River Dies of Thirst: Diaries, the English version of the last collection by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008. Catherine Cobham translated it for Saqi Books in 2009 (165 pages, 10.99 pounds), and Ruth Padel contributes an introduction that links Darwish with Seamus Heaney. The book was written over the summers of 2006 and 2007 and appeared in Arabic under a title meaning The Butterfly Effect. Daniels regrets that the original title was dropped, since a small change spreading through a larger system suits both the loss of Palestine and the loss of the poet. She also reflects on the burden of the label 'national poet of Palestine'.

She reads the book as a scrapbook of 126 entries, mixing prose poems, free verse, aphorisms and confessions, in which the voice slides between 'I' and 'he' and keeps questioning its own existence. She points to the dialogue between the social, constructed Darwish and the inspired creator ('My Poet/My Other'), to Cartesian doubts about mind and body, and to a Jungian shadow left on a thorn bush. Taken whole, she finds it a startlingly narcissistic contemplation of the self, shadowed by a foreboding of death and handling nostalgia, memory and love with unbearable gentleness. Poems such as 'The Mercy Bullet' and 'I Walked on My Heart' carry that weariness.

The political texts get their own discussion. 'The Wall' comments sardonically on the Separation Barrier, 'Routine' sets the destruction of Arab homes inside a weather report, one poem turns criticism on Palestinians themselves, and 'From Now On You Are Somebody Else' laments the fighting between Hamas and Fatah. Daniels shows Darwish redefining heroism as the life-affirming force of metaphor, so that even a love poem, of which there are eight, can be resistance. Other poems treat fame as a many-windowed prison and criticise critics ('Assassination'), while the conditional titles ('If Only I Were a Stone') show him renegotiating his past.

She also notes allusions to Khalil Gibran, to classical drinking poetry, to Abu Nuwas and al-Mutanabbi, and to his own earlier poems, together with exchanges with Sa'di Yusuf, Derek Walcott and Mark Strand and the domestic detail of 'A Coloured Cloud'. Daniels ends by calling the translation a fine posthumous one that shows his playful experiment with form to the last.

Work

A River Dies of Thirst: Diaries

Author

Mahmoud Darwish

Publisher

Saqi Books

Poems in this selection

• The Wall
• Routine
• From Now On You Are Somebody Else
• A Shameful Land
• The Return of June
• A Coloured Cloud
• The Mercy Bullet
• Assassination

may be read as a scrapbook chronicling the twilight of a great literary and political life

Kate Daniels, The Wolf, issue 22