Description
Book SynopsisAn inspiring new selection of poems exploring faith and the divine, featuring poets from across the world, from antiquity to the present, compiled by renowned poet and author of Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar
A Penguin ClassicPoets have always looked to the skies for inspiration, and have written as a way of getting closer to the power and beauty they sense in nature, in each other and in the cosmos. This anthology is a holistic and global survey of a lyric conversation about the divine, one which has been ongoing for millennia.
Beginning with the earliest attributable author in all of human literature, the twenty-third century BC Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna, and taking in a constellation of voices - from King David to Lao Tzu, from the
Epic of Gilgamesh to the Malian
Epic of Sundiata - this selection presents a number of canonical voices like Blake, Dickinson and Tagore, alongside lesser-anthologized diverse voices going up to the present
Trade ReviewIf poetry is prayer, here are scriptures. Kaveh Akbar's brave, encompassing map of spiritual hunger shows us that longing belongs to all of us, whatever the languages we speak or the geographies we inhabit -- Jeet Thayil
An amazing collection of spiritual verse from many cultures and periods, from ancient Sumer in the third millennium BCE up to the present. There cannot be any other anthology that ranges so widely, and anyone concerned with either poetry or spirituality will want to own a copy -- John Barton * author of A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths *
Wonderfully rich, this beautiful anthology of verse uniquely displays how humans over centuries and across continents have wrestled with the concept of the divine and, in turn, humanity's relationship with that divinity. From exaltation to lament, from reflections on beauty to explorations of science, these words draw the reader's eyes towards the wonder of the numinous. A delightful celebration of human creativity, with new insights from a trusted guide: Kaveh Akbar -- Chine McDonald * director of Theos and author of God Is Not a White Man: And Other Revelations *
What an amazing compilation: beautifully edited, translated, introduced, this book is far more than a typical poetry anthology. What is it, then? It is our chance to overhear the splendid poet Kaveh Akbar whisper to himself words which he lives by, as he embarks on his own journey of spirit, loss, astonishment, bewilderment, and, perhaps, understanding. The chorus of voices gathered offer a balm, a consolation, a tune, in our desolate world -- Ilya Kaminsky * author of Deaf Republic *
How can language approach the spiritual - that which remains unlanguaged - and trace the limen between the self and what it falls silent before? In
The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse, Kaveh Akbar takes up this timeless inquiry with expansive curatorial shaping and heady joy, threading together Li Po and Adelia Prado, Hafez with Jabès, reverent with ludic, divine with corporeal, and everything that gets charged through, and between, them. Vibrating across this thick bundle of verse is the animation of the spirit enmeshed with the body, astounding in its ever-shifting forms, its irrepressible music. These poems "thin the partition between a person and a divine," and they do so sublimely: making porous the border between the self and all that beckons beyond understanding -- Jenny Xie
The choices Kaveh Akbar has made for this anthology of spiritual verse are spectacularly excellent. They are from regions of poetry at once accessible and exalted, representing the most intense of human experiences, the experiences of the divine, the yearning for the holy. Multiple cultures are represented: texts of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Arabic speaking world, the Farsi speaking world, poets of Hindi and Urdu, poets from everywhere in Asia, Africa, Europe, as well as England and the USA. Here is a page of Lucretius, there a page of Dante (splendidly translated by Mary Jo Bang), and over there, Nazim Hikmet. There are several astonishing women, including Enheduanna, Mirabai, Gabriela Mistral. The book holds an embarrassment of riches, yet is light on its feet. You can easily carry it with you in an outside pocket of your knapsack. You too will be smitten by the yearning that animates and drives these poems. Akbar's Introduction, and his notes on individual poems, are extra added value: the words of a poet -- Alicia Ostriker * New York State Poet Laureate 2018-2021, author of the volcano and after:Selected and New Poems, 2002-2019 *
Table of ContentsIntroductionEnheduanna, from ‘Hymn to Inanna’
Unknown, ‘Death of Enkidu’, from
The Epic of Gilgamesh Unknown, from
The Book of the Dead Unknown, Song of Songs, chapters 1 and 2
King David, Psalm 23
Homer, from
The Odyssey Sappho, Fragments 22 and 118
Patacara, ‘When they plow their fields’
Lao Tzu, ‘Easy by Nature’, from
Tao Te Ching Chandaka, Two Cosmologies
Vyasa, from the
Bhagavad Gita Lucretius, from
The Nature of Things Virgil, from
The Aeneid Shenoute, ‘Homily’
Sengcan, ‘The Mind of Absolute Trust’
From the Quran
Kakinomoto Hitomaro, ‘In praise of Empress Jitō’
Li Po, ‘Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon’
Rabi’a al-Basri, ‘O my lord’
Ono No Komachi, ‘This inn’
Hanshan, ‘Hanshan’s Poem’
Al-Husayn ibn Ahmad ibn Khalawayh, ‘Names of the Lion’
Unknown, Anglo-Saxon charm
Izumi Shikibu, ‘Things I Want Decided’
Li Qingzhao, ‘Late Spring’
Hildegard of Bingen, ‘Song to the Creator’
Mahadeviyakka, ‘I do not call it his sign’
Attar of Nishapur, ‘Parable of the Dead Dervishes in the Desert’
St Francis of Assisi, ‘Canticle of the Sun’
Wumen Huikai, from
The Gateless Gate Rūmī, ‘Lift Now the Lid of the Jar of Heaven’
Mechthild of Magdeburg, ‘Of all that God has shown me’
Saadi Shirazi, ‘The Grass Cried Out’
Thomas Aquinas, ‘Lost, All in Wonder’
Moses de León, from
The Sepher Zohar Dante Alighieri, from
Inferno, Canto III
from the
Sundiata Hafez, Ghazal 17
Yaqui people, ‘Deer Song’
Nezahualcoyotl, ‘The Painted Book’
Kabir, ‘Brother, I’ve seen some’
Mirabai, ‘O friend, understand’
Yoruba people, from
A Recitation of Ifa Teresa of Ávila, ‘Laughter Came from Every Brick’
Gaspara Stampa, ‘Deeply repentant of my sinful ways’
St John of the Cross, ‘O Love’s living flame’
Mayan people, from the
Popol Vuh Christopher Marlowe, from
Faustus William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146
John Donne, ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God’
Nahuatl people, ‘The Midwife Addresses the Woman’
George Herbert, ‘Easter Wings’
Walatta Petros/Gälawdewos, from
The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros John Milton, from
Paradise Lost, Book 4
Bashō, ‘Death Song’ and ‘In Kyoto’
Juana Inés de la Cruz, ‘Suspend, singer swan, the sweet strain’
Yosa Buson, ‘A solitude’
Olaudah Equiano, ‘Miscellaneous Verses’
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Wanderer’s Nightsong II’
Phillis Wheatley, ‘On Virtue’
William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’
Kobayashi Issa, ‘All the time I pray to Buddha’
John Clare, ‘I Am!’
John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
Mirza Ghalib, ‘For the Raindrop’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Grief’
Frederick Douglass, ‘A Parody’
Emily Dickinson, ‘I prayed, at first, a little Girl’
Uvavnuk, ‘The Great Sea’
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’
Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Temple of Gold’
Constantine Cavafy, ‘Body, Remember’
W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’
Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Second Duino Elegy’
Muhammad Iqbal, ‘These are the days of lightning’
Yosano Akiko, ‘To punish’
Sarojini Naidu, ‘In the Bazaars of Hyderabad’
Delmira Agustini, ‘Inextinguishables’
Gabriela Mistral, ‘The Return’
Anna Akhmatova, from ‘Requiem’
Osip Mandelstam, ‘O Lord, help me to live through this night’
Edith Södergran, ‘A Life’
Marina Tsvetaeva, from
Poems to Czechia María Sabina, from ‘The Midnight Velada’
Xu Zhimo, ‘Second Farewell to Cambridge’
Federico García Lorca, ‘Farewell’
Nâzim Hikmet, ‘Things I Didn’t Know I Loved’
Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Totem’
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, ‘Before You Came’
Czesław Miłosz, ‘Dedication’
Edmond Jabès, ‘At the Threshold of the Book’
Aimé Césaire, from
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
Octavio Paz, ‘Brotherhood: Homage to Claudius Ptolemy’
Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘God’s One Mistake’
Paul Celan, ‘There was Earth in Them’
Paul Laraque, ‘Rainbow’
Nazik Al-Malaika, ‘Love Song for Words’
Wisława Szymborska, ‘Astonishment’
Zbigniew Herbert, ‘The Envoy of Mr Cogito’
Yehuda Amichai, ‘A Man in His Life’
Ingeborg Bachmann, ‘Every Day’
Kim Nam-Jo, ‘Foreign Flags’
Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Bread’
Adonis, ‘The New Noah’
Christopher Okigbo, ‘Come Thunder’
Ingrid Jonker, ‘There Is Just One Forever’
Jean Valentine, ‘The River at Wolf’
Kofi Awoonor, ‘At the Gates’
Adélia Prado, ‘Dysrhythmia’
Lucille Clifton, ‘my dream about God’
Vénus Khoury-Ghata, from
She Says Mahmoud Darwish, ‘I Didn’t Apologize to the Well’
M. NourbeSe Philip, from
Zong! Inrasara, from
Allegory of the Land
Sources Acknowledgements Index of First Lines Index of Titles
