An 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 Kaveh Akbar
A Penguin Classic
Poets 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 day, that showcase the breathtaking multiplicity of ways humanity has responded to the divine across place and time.
These poets' voices commune between millenia, offering readers a chance to experience for themselves the vast and powerful interconnectedness of these incantations orbiting the most elemental of all subjects - our spirit.
Recenzijas
If 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 Jabčs, 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 *
Introduction
Enheduanna, 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 Jit
Li Po, Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon
Rabia al-Basri, O my lord
Ono No Komachi, This inn
Hanshan, Hanshans 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
Rm, 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, Ive seen some
Mirabai, O friend, understand
Yoruba people, from A Recitation of Ifa
Teresa of Įvila, Laughter Came from Every Brick
Gaspara Stampa, Deeply repentant of my sinful ways
St John of the Cross, O Loves living flame
Mayan people, from the Popol Vuh
Christopher Marlowe, from Faustus
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146
John Donne, Batter my heart, three-persond 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
Bash, 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, Wanderers 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, Gods 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
Marķa Sabina, from The Midnight Velada
Xu Zhimo, Second Farewell to Cambridge
Federico Garcķa Lorca, Farewell
Nāzim Hikmet, Things I Didnt Know I Loved
Léopold Sédar Senghor, Totem
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Before You Came
Czesaw Miosz, Dedication
Edmond Jabčs, 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, Gods One Mistake
Paul Celan, There was Earth in Them
Paul Laraque, Rainbow
Nazik Al-Malaika, Love Song for Words
Wisawa 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 Didnt Apologize to the Well
M. NourbeSe Philip, from Zong!
Inrasara, from Allegory of the Land
Sources
Acknowledgements
Index of First Lines
Index of Titles
Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian American poet and scholar. He is the author of the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell, Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Portrait of the Alcoholic, and the novel Martyr!. He teaches Creative Writing and Poetry of the Divine at Purdue University, Indiana.
