Ghassan Zaqtan is one of the most original and compelling
Palestinian poets of his generation. A novelist, editor, playwright and
filmmaker, he has written ten books of poetry, including Like a Straw
Bird It Follows Me, awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize in
2013. The Silence that Remains introduces readers in the UK for the
first time to Zaqtan's early work, including his debut collection
destroyed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Writing about
personal memory as a form of political and social activism, while
avoiding the mythology of exile and displacement, Ghassan creates an
aesthetic of fragments, an imaginative archaeology of fragile human
subjects. It's a book about the silence of the tongue and the silence of
the heart, the silence of resistance and the resistance of silence.