With books of poetry, I usually find some poems resonate and others do not (one exception, Robert Frost). What I do have after reading this particular collection is a profound respect for Darwish as a serious and self-aware poet, who knows how to exploit tension on so many levels. The most obvious source of this tension for Darwish is the displacement of the Palestinian people; however, The poet doesn't leave us there. He uses this struggle to embody the tensions felt between the poet and the word, between the East and West as they collide in the ME, between spiritual beliefs, and the tensions experienced when one struggles to define himself. Of particular resonance for me was a poem entitled, "The Phases of Anat," which truly illuminated the mythopoetic duality of Palestine since its earliest inhabitants roamed the land. Nothing has changed here, says Darwish, even that tension between the power and the futility of words.