Read Some Darwish This Weekend

This Sunday will be the first anniversary of the death of legendary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. When he died last year, The Guardian hailed his poetry, saying he did as much as anyone to forge a Palestinian national consciousness.
This weekend, I'll definitely be reading some of this intriguing writer's poetry. Much of his work is already available, although Darwish's prodigious output includes some 30 collections of poems, and English-language publishers are still catching up with it.
Interlink has just published a collection titled Almond Blossoms and Beyond, one of his last collections, which is composed of brief lyric poems and the magnificent sustained 'Exile' cycle.
Archipelago has just published Voice Over, a sort of tribute/conversation by poet and novelist Breyten Breytenbach. Later this year they will be publishing A River Dies of Thirst, Darwish's journals, which they call a remarkable collection of poems, meditations, fragments, and journal entries and was Darwish's last book to appear in Arabic. (I'll be looking in on both of these this weekend.)
The Center's own anthology will publish a never-before-translated poem of Darwish's titled Rita's Winter. Translator Fady Joudah describes this substantial, eight-page work and the woman it is named for thus:

Rita is a pseudonym for Darwish's Jewish Israeli lover when he was in his twenties and he had written five or six poems to her throughout the 1960s and 70s before writing this one, his final one for her, in 1992. Rita was made an icon of contemporary Arabic culture through the Lebanese composer and musician, Marcel Khalife, who sang Darwish's poem Rita and the Rifle (where love is broken because of the Israeli military service). I can say that Rita signifies an essence of Darwish's poetry, its humanizing of the other, a daring from which Darwish never shied. I can say Rita's Winter is a brilliant poem because it exhibits, among many other things, Darwish's use of dialogue, an art he developed until he turned his later poems into plays, without calling them plays.