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Rain Inside

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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.

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.