Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?

At once an intimate autobiography and a collective memory of the Palestinian people, Mahmoud Darwish’s interlinked poems are collective cries, songs, and glimpses of the human condition. The collection—widely considered his chef-d’oeuvre—is a poetry of myth and history, of exile and suspended time, of an identity bound to the Arabic language and his displaced people. Darwish’s poems—specific and symbolic, simple and profound—are historical glimpses, existential queries, chants of pain and injustice of a people separated from their land.