Rain Inside [Paperback]

Ibrahim Nasrallah (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2009

A Palestinian poet, Ibrahim Nasrallah is among the foremost poets of his generation. In this collection, Nasrallah describes the suffering of the Palestinians not through a personal lens, but through a universal context. He observes life with a natural human tendency toward a love that can heal, transcend, and transform the pain and sorrow of human experience.

“Taste”

There’s the dewy taste of seas and clouds in the dust,
the taste of the expanse and the rain,
of plains, mountains, humans,
of feminity, love, and intrepid oranges,
of childhood and saffron,
of living in my mother’s heart,
of travel,
and of your soul and mine.
But my beloved trees steal toward the source
to taste it in solitude, before any of us

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The poet Ibrahim Nasrallah has absorbed both the 'bloody sorrow' of humanity and 'the steady radiance / at the heart of the world,' that bi-level core of experience which cannot be separated from the sociopolitical. His poems manifest a bountiful and beautiful poetics, and they run a fever. They get under your skin. This is poetry to be read and reread for how it feels"—Marvin Bell

"A tragicomic quotidian essence pervades these poems, and palpable echoes of Zbigniew Herbert's words are easily heard. Nasrallah's poems are a welcome translation. They expand and shape our vision of Palestinian poetry's rightful place in world literature."—Fady Joudah

Book Description

A Palestinian poet, Ibrahim Nasrallah is among the foremost poets of his generation. In this collection, Nasrallah describes the suffering of the Palestinians not through a personal lens, but through a universal context. He observes life with a natural human tendency toward a love that can heal, transcend, and transform the pain and sorrow of human experience.

“Taste”

There’s the dewy taste of seas and clouds in the dust,
the taste of the expanse and the rain,
of plains, mountains, humans,
of feminity, love, and intrepid oranges,
of childhood and saffron,
of living in my mother’s heart,
of travel,
and of your soul and mine.
But my beloved trees steal toward the source
to taste it in solitude, before any of us

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 126 pages
• Publisher: Curbstone Books (June 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931896526
• ISBN-13: 978-1931896528
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,825,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars poems with universal perspectives by a Palestinian, July 15, 2009

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rain Inside (Paperback)

Though Nasrallah is a Palestinian and has suffered oppression for this in Jordan where he has lived for many years, this background is evident only lightly in his poems. As one of the translators, Omnia Amin, writes in his introduction "A Replenishing Poet of the Diaspora," Nasrallah's poetry "transcends any determination of personal strife, reaching to universal themes, where the sorrows of all humanity are realized." The poems of this volume selected by Nasrallah from many sources over his long, noted career are a combination of shorter poems which like Japanese haiku (as noted by Amin) awaken "philosophical insight by means of an everyday event or object" and medium-length poems of most of a page or more which "honor and transcend the Palestinian experience by opening it onto the world, and by opening his poems to the pain of every individual who lives in difficulty without regard to color, religion, or national identity."

One of Nasrallah's haiku-like poems in its entirety is "Strangers" (in the group with the title "The Chairs"): "How dark/how dull/Those who came and went away like strangers/Even their women and their small girls were sullen/This is how the chairs sit quietly thinking/in the evening." In longer poems, the poet writes, "He sips her face in the winter morning/descends the stairs of her sorrows/and sings of warmth./A path opens before him and he takes it." [from His Shadow Is Departing]; and "He did not invent a word for departure/and did not shed a faint star in his tears,/nor did he carry grass in his hands, or the rushing trees." [from Departure] Nasrallah discerns a fresh poignancy in the quotidian.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A top pick for world poetry collections, July 11, 2009

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rain Inside (Paperback)

A people in constant conflict, "Rain Inside" brings a Palestinian poet's work to the world for English speakers to embrace for the first time. Simple and straightforward with the emotions set forth, poet Ibrahim Nasrallah inspires the reader with the resilience of the Palestinian spirit and the universal essence in all of us. "Rain Inside" is a top pick for world poetry collections. "Strangers": How dark how dull/Those who came and went away like strangers/Even their women and small girls were sullen/this is how the chairs sit quietly thinking/in the evening.