By Mahmoud Darwish (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00)

After Mahmoud Darwish's recent death a number of books of his poetry and letters were issued by small presses. They are all worthwhile, I think, but I have no problem telling you that this book eclipses the rest. Darwish's voice can sound so stilted in some translations, so flavorless in others. In Joudah--himself a remarkable poet--he has his perfect translator: those rhythms become baroque hints of a classical Arabic idiom beside tense modernist lacunae. There is the exile here, yes, but the aging genius, too.