While Hasib Hourani’s Rock Flight and Samah Sabawi’s Cactus Pear for My Beloved are both books by Australian writers that speak of the Palestinian experience, they could not be more different.
This is not simply because one is a book-length poem, the other a novelised biography. Hourani’s Rock Flight is minimalist, almost brutalist in its aesthetics. Cactus Pear for My Love, by contrast, is written with the detail and warmth of a storyteller who wants to commemorate a much-loved subject.
