This is a great collection of poetry written by Mahmoud Darwish, who was the single most important modern poet in the Arab world (and really still is) and is probably in the top ten best poets in the world during the entire modern period. The poems here are beautiful and evocative, and “The Eternity of Cactus” is especially so. It gives the collection its titular line: Darwish describes how he fled Palestine during the Nakba, and looked back from Lebanon and saw that the horse was still at home.

I can’t say that I loved that quite as much as his work in Mural or In the Presence of Absence, but it’s well worth the read.