Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing - Hardcover

Barks, Coleman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060523166 ISBN 13: 9780060523169

Publisher: HarperOne, 2002

Synopsis

Rumi: The Book of Love is a collection of astonishing poems for lovers from the mystic Rumi, by the translator who made him sing anew, Coleman Barks.

Poetry and Rumi fans will want to own this gorgeously packaged compilation of love poems by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic. Rumi is best known and most cherished as the poet of love in all its forms, and renowned poet and Rumi interpretor Coleman Barks has gathered the best of these poems in delightful and wise renderings that will open your heart and soul to the lover inside and out.

About this title

About the Author

Coleman Barks is a renowned poet and the bestselling author of The Essential Rumi, Rumi: The Big Red Book, The Soul of Rumi, Rumi: The Book of Love, and The Drowned Book. He was prominently featured in both of Bill Moyers' PBS television series on poetry, The Language of Life and Fooling with Words. He taught English and poetry at the University of Georgia for thirty years, and he now focuses on writing, readings, and performances.

From the Back Cover

The Sufi mystic and poet Jalaluddin Rumi is most beloved for his poems expressing the ecstasies and mysteries of love in all its forms—erotic, platonic, divine—and Coleman Barks presents the best of them in this delightful and inspiring collection. Rendered with freshness, intensity, and beauty as Barks alone can do, these startling and rich poems range from the "wholeness" one experiences with a true lover, to the grief of a lover's loss, and all the states in between: from the madness of sudden love to the shifting of a romance to deep friendship to the immersion in divine love. Rumi, the ultimate poet of love, explores all "the magnificent regions of the heart," and he opens you to the lover within. Coleman Barks has made this medieval, Persian-born (present-day Afghanistan) poetic and spiritual genius the most popular poet in America today. This seductive volume reveals Rumi's charms and depths more than any other.

Reviews

The Sufi mystic Rumi has sold more than half a million volumes of his poetry-no small feat, considering that he lived in the 13th century. In this collection, poet Coleman Barks offers a funny, iconoclastic preface in which he attempts to tease out the reasons for Rumi's contemporary renaissance. He also warns readers that what follows will not be a pretty, happy book of love poetry: "This is not Norman Vincent Peale urging cheerfulness, conventional morality, and soft-focus, white-light, feel-good...New Age tantric energy exchange. This is giving your life to the one within that you know as LORD, which is a totally private matter." Rumi, he writes, is not the stuff of greeting cards. The poetry, accessibly translated and arranged by Barks, is organized by loose themes such as love's discipline, the new life with the beloved, "sudden wholeness," and love's excess.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Coleman Barks begins the preface of his gazillionth book of Rumi translations by saying, "I have sold too many books." Maybe so, but he hasn't tired of translating and retranslating Rumi. And people never seem to tire of reading the great Sufi mystic. Here, Barks delves into Rumi's take on love, retranslating dozens of poems he first adapted for The Essential Rumi (1995) and offering a few new translations. Rumi's love was, of course, about a great deal more than romance. Seeking annihilation in the Divine, Rumi basked in many forms of divine love, from his passionate (and, some argue, homoerotic) love for his teacher Shams to a reverence for the natural world. Barks has been criticized for basing his reworkings of Rumi on English translations instead of the original texts, but the two poets together are clearly a magical combination. Rumi's copious metaphorical expressions of love and the importance of unifying with it make wonderful reading. If Barks' versions are fast and loose, they are also, like Rumi himself, beautiful and accessible. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060523166
• ISBN 13: 9780060523169
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240