Almond Blossoms and Beyond Book

I read this while listening to a spotify playlist "poetry of mahmoud darwish" and the experience has filled my heart with so much love

"[Mahmoud Darwish] quickly became, by the mid-1960s, the Palestinian Resistance Poet par excellence, striving to create a "national poem," while at the same time preserving the deep, human essence of poetry, which transcends context and is in tune with, as Wordsworth called it, "the still, sad music of humanity." It was possibly this striving, which gave his poetry a special dynamic, that led him to experiment with a new type of love poem that goes beyond both the sort of love poem that Nizar Qabbani made popular and the old Arabic love poem. By identifying the lost land of Palestine with his beloved, Darwish freed the traditional love poem from its narrower associations with lover and beloved, and imbued it with universal human values, deriving from love of the land, the meaning of love as it should be, and from the anguish of exile, human exile in its existential significance. Thus Darwish will oscillate in a poem which at first appears to be merely political agitation, between the national and the human, being aware as he was, from very early on, that the meaning of poetry lies in the contemplation of what is eternal and universal: love, death, and the boundless mystery of existence."