Back-cover text:
Written after a near-death experience, Mural is Mahmoud Darwish’s profound poetic reckoning with mortality. Standing at the threshold between life and death, the poet confronts the unknown, speaks with his absent self, and asks what remains of a human being when the body, homeland, and even memory begin to recede.
Yet Mural is not a surrender to death. It is a powerful affirmation of language against oblivion. Moving between autobiography and myth, the intimate and the universal, Darwish summons figures from ancient epics, sacred narratives, and Arabic poetic tradition, weaving them into his own experience of exile, love, loss, and belonging. Palestine is ever present—not merely as a place, but as memory, wound, identity, and an enduring question.
At once meditative and defiant, lyrical and philosophical, Mural is one of Darwish’s most ambitious works: a book-length poem in which the poet inscribes his presence upon the wall of time and declares the enduring power of poetry in the face of death.