Guest Review: Matt Horton

The Lives of Rain
By Nathalie Handal
Interlink Books
Paperback, 67 pp.

In the tradition of Darwish, young Palestinian women in the Diaspora are taking up the mantle of modern Palestinian poetry. Nathalie Handal, a “poet in violet solitude” riding “sailboats across the world’s heart,” beautifully describes the continuing agony of exile of her generation of refugees, who should “no longer be sheets flying to nowhere.” In The Neverfield, she exudes beauty in the face of exile and finds a homeland in poetry. There, despite her uneasiness as a refugee, she obviously is at home in her language, so natural in describing her shifting state that she seems at peace. The poem reads like a love song to Mahmoud Darwish, conscious of his influence and ready to inherit the weight of responsibility she is assuming. Her mad and frantic verse exhibits a unique sanity in an insane world.

In The Lives of Rain, Handal stands, weeps and celebrates as her poems “travel and move from one continent to the next, move, to be whole.” The poet seamlessly weaves her experience in Europe, Latin America, and the Arab world through this “love song in the back pocket of a martyr.” Her travels revolve around her current home, New York, where the rain gathers in puddles, ebbs, flows and disperses into lives of love, beauty and pain.