The Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, who has died aged 86, forcefully expressed a nation's sense of loss and defiance. Moshe Dayan, the Israeli general, likened reading one of Tuqan's poems to facing 20 enemy commandos. In Martyrs Of The Intifada, Tuqan wrote of young stone-throwers:

They died standing, blazing on the road

Shining like stars, their lips pressed to the lips of life

They stood up in the face of death

Then disappeared like the sun.

Yet the true power of her words derived not from warlike imagery, but their affirmation of Palestinian identity and the dream of return. In Call Of The Land (1954), she tells how a refugee is lured by the distant lights of Jaffa to cross the border, knowing he will lose his life.

In a gentler sequel, Tuqan depicts herself as a link in the chain of history:

I ask nothing more

Than to die in my country

To dissolve and merge with the grass,

To give life to a flower

That a child of my country will pick,

All I ask

Is to remain in the bosom of my country

As soil,

Grass,

A flower.

Fadwa Tuqan was the sister of the poet, playwright and Radio Palestine director, Ibrahim Tuqan, who died in 1941 and whose poems became rallying cries for Palestinians during the anti-British revolt of 1933-37. Ibrahim tutored his younger sister in poetry via letters posted from Beirut, where he was lecturing.

She was born in Nablus, shortly before the Balfour declaration promised the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine. Her upbringing was privileged, yet strictly circumscribed by social norms. In 1948, when thousands of Palestinian Arabs poured into Nablus, the town assumed the cultural mantle of the lost cities of Jaffa, Haifa and West Jerusalem. Paradoxically, the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) and the death of Fadwa's stern father, also in 1948, coincided with a sense of liberation for the poet. Feudalism crumbled. Suddenly, young and educated women could mix freely with their male counterparts. "When the roof fell on Palestine, the veil fell off the face of the Nablus woman," she wrote.

Imbued with this heady spirit, Tuqan followed her initial collection, My Brother Ibrahim (1946), with new ones: Alone With The Days (1952), Give Us Love (1960), and Before The Closed Door (1967). They trace the evolution of Palestinian political consciousness: from shock, despair and victimhood, to summud (steadfastness), resistance and renewed pride.

Israel, however, was not her only foe. Another was Arab society itself, and, in particular, its treatment of women. In her autobiography, translated as Mountainous Journey (1990), she describes how Arab women were hidden in the household like frightened birds in a crowded coop.

Her student years at Oxford University, 1962-64, where she studied English language and literature, represented a welcome escape from the sorrows of the Levant. She relished the English country-side, and wrote affectionately of the "aged metropolis", London, where anyone could become anonymous - for a moment, at least. Fadwa travelled widely in Europe and the Middle East, borrowing motifs from her life in exile and mingling them with daring expressions of untrammelled sensuality.

But even poems based on distinctly non-Palestinian subjects - such as Visions Of Henry, inspired by a painting by William Faulkner - hark back to her "lost homeland". They reveal the clash between escapism and the "black rock" of memory. Fadwa's poetry became more overtly nationalistic after Israel came to rule Nablus in 1967. Occupation provided new topics - the ordeal of waiting at border crossings, the indignity of house demolitions, and the fervour of the children's uprising. Yet her poems also display a hitherto absent recognition of the enemy's bonds to the land.

Tuqan gained an international audience after her poetry was translated into English in the 1980s. Young Arab-Americans read her work to rediscover their roots; Israeli and Jewish feminists divined a sympathetic resonance from their sister across the "green line". She did not marry or have children.

Tuqan won poetry prizes from Italy, Greece and Jordan; gained the Palestinians' Jerusalem Award for Culture and Art in 1990; and served on the board of trustees for An-Najah University in Nablus. Many Israelis, however, regarded her political analyses as woefully two-dimensional. Some Palestinians felt that her attacks on Arab society merely reconfirmed the "orientalist" prejudices of westerners.

Ultimately, Tuqan will be remembered for the potency of her poetry. To Salma Jayussi she was "a mistress of two gifts: love and pain"; a woman who undeniably preserved her people's memories and expressed their aspirations.

· Fadwa Tuqan, poet, born March 1 1917; died December 12 2003