The Essential Rumi
10 best books like The Essential Rumi (Rumi): The Gift, The Prophet, The Leaf And The Cloud: A Poem, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy, The Collected Poems, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia: Translations from the Poems of Sanai, Attar, Rumi, Saadi and Hafiz
| Author | Hafez |
| ISBN | 0140195815 |
More than any other Persian poet, it is perhaps Hafiz who accesses the mystical, healing dimensions of poetry. Because his poems were often ecstatic love songs from God to his beloved world, many have called Hafiz the "Tongue of the Invisible."
With this stunning collection of 250 of Hafiz's...
Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet, is one of the most beloved classics of our time. Published in 1923, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies.
The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that...
| Author | Mary Oliver |
| ISBN | 0306810735 |
With piercing clarity and craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has fashioned an unforgettable poem of questioning and discovery, about what is observable and what is not, about what passes and what persists. As the U.S. Poet Laureate, Stanley Kunitz, has said: "Mary Oliver's poetry is fine and deep; it reads...
| Author | Ono no Komachi |
| ISBN | 0679729585 |
Japanese poetry is said to be originated in human heart and mind and grows in to the myriad leaves of words. The collection of poems The Ink Dark Moon is from the Heian era of Japanese literature, the era is considered as Golden Age in the history of Japanese literature. The language in that era was very inflected...
| Author | Hafez |
| ISBN | 0143037811 |
From the renowned translator of The Gift, a rich collection that brings the great Sufi poet to Western readers
To Persians , the poems of Hafiz are not "classical literature" from a remote past but cherished wisdom from a dear and intimate friend that continue to be quoted in daily life. With...
| Author | Theodore Roethke |
| ISBN | 0385086016 |
There a several poems by Roethke that I quite like. Once in a while I think he is brilliant. But I've decided I can't read collections of his work. There is too much I don't care for, and too much repetition -- primarily repetition of a mood of self-absorption that gets old fast. Lust, guilt, poor you, whatever....
| Author | Rainer Maria Rilke |
| ISBN | 1573225851 |
At the beginning of this century, a young German poet returned from a journey to Russia, where he had immersed himself in the spirituality he discovered there. He "received" a series of poems about which he did not speak for a long time - he considered them sacred, and different from anything else he ever...
| Author | Czesław Miłosz |
| ISBN | 0156005743 |
"A collection of 300 poems from writers around the world, selected and edited by Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz Czesław Miłosz's A Book of Luminous Things—his personal selection of poems from the past and present—is a testament to the stunning varieties of human experience, offered up so...
| Author | Jane Hirshfield |
| ISBN | 0060925760 |
A combination of spiritual poetry and history of the poets. Really expansive, beautiful, informative collection.
My favorites were:
p 21, Zi Ye
All night I could not sleep / because of the moonlight on my bed. / I kept on hearing a voice calling: / Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered...
| Author | Coleman Barks |
| ISBN | 0930872479 |
The book offer entrance into a world and beauty and truth. Its method is two-fold. First it presents five important lectures on Persian poetry given by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, who brought Sufis to the West. Then it offers fresh translations by the poet Coleman Barks of some of the poetry Inayat Khan...
| Author | Daniel Ladinsky |
| ISBN | 0142196126 |
Sacred poetry from twelve mystics and saints, rendered brilliantly by Daniel Ladinsky, beloved interpreter of verses by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz
In this luminous collection, Daniel Ladinsky—best known for his gifted and bestselling interpretations of the great...
| Author | Pablo Neruda |
| ISBN | 0060928778 |
The poetry of Pablo Neruda is beloved worldwide for its passion, humor, and exceptional accessibility. The nearly fifty poems selected for this collection and translated by Stephen Mitchell—widely praised for his original and definitive translations of spiritual writings and poetry—focus...
| Author | Du Fu |
| ISBN | 0811211002 |
Tu Fu radically altered poetry as he found it in the High T’ang period. In addition to making formal innovations in language and structure, he extended the range of acceptable subject matter to include all aspects of public and private experience, thus becoming in the words of translator David Hinton,...
| Author | Kabir |
| ISBN | 0807063797 |
Not all that long ago, in another review, I wrote that I preferred the Rabindranath Tagore translation to this one. I take it back. I was a fool to say so. Revisiting Bly’s translation recently, after more than two decades, I was struck by its clarity, its passion, its vivid and compelling voice.
I...
An anthology of poetry chosen from the world's great religious and literary traditions--the perfect companion to the bestselling Tao Te Ching.
• The Upanishads • The Book of Psalms • Lao-tzu • The Bhagavad Gita • Chuang-tzu • The Odes of Solomon • Seng-ts'an • Han-shan •...
| Author | Franklin D. Lewis |
| ISBN | 1851682147 |
Just reading in this again. I don't see how it can be over-praised. I'm not a scholar of East Asian literatures, nor a comparative medievalist, so I speak with no authority more than a sincere desire to move closer to Rumi's vast oeurve, in English, sorting through the issues of Persian as scrupulously...
The definitive compendium of Sufi wisdom, 'Essential Sufism' draws together more than three hundred fables, poems and prayers that reveal the luminous spirit of Islamic mysticism. Embracing all eras and highlighting the many faces of Sufism, this collection provides a matchless overview of the...
| Author | Robert Hass |
| ISBN | 0613339983 |
American readers have been fascinated since their exposure to Japanese culture late in the nineteenth century, with the brief Japanese poem called the hokku or haiku. The seventeen-syllable form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion....
| Author | Bill Moyers |
| ISBN | 0385479174 |
Poets live the lives all of us live," says Bill Moyers, "with one big difference. They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions other can share. We only have to learn to listen."
In a series of fascinating conversations with thirty-four American poets, "The...
| Author | Robert Bly |
| ISBN | 0060924209 |
This is one of my favorite all-time poetry anthologies. I picked it up at a discount bookstore in San Francisco, back when I was still a reader searching for the right books. And I swear, back when I was reading mostly fiction and memoir, and my depression was making nonsense of my writing, this book brought...
