Added by: JustGoodNews | Karma: 4306.26 | Fiction literature | 22 May 2010
8
The Love Poems of Rumi
These Rumi translation are open and welcoming. They are not just for lovers. Rumi speaks of self-love, and platonic love. These sensual poems are not so concrete that they are difficult to interpret. Read them to a lover and watch them blush and smile. See in their eyes a hint of recognition. After all poetry is a brilliant way to make love! However, this book was not nearly long enough, and the feel of the book was far too "abridged" for my taste. I gave this as a gift, which it was perfect for, but if I were buying it for myself, I would have wanted more of a complete works.
Sylvia Plath died in 1963, and even now her outsize persona threatens to bury her poetry--the numerous biographies and studies often drawing the reader toward anecdote and away from the work. It's a relief to turn to the poems themselves and once more be jolted by their strange beauty, hard-wrought originality, and acetylene anger.
The prolific Pulitzer Prize winner Tate (Return to the City of White Donkeys) has been inching toward the invention of a new kind of American poem, a hybrid of prose poetry (though he's got loose, almost arbitrary line breaks), fable, surrealism and a sort of outsider folk poetry.
Robert Bly's new collection of poetry is made of forty-eight poems written in the intricate form called the ghazal, which is the central poetic form in Islam. The influence of Hafez and Rumi is clear, and yet the poems descend into the wealth of Western history, referring at times to Monet, Giordano Bruno,Emerson, St. Francis, Newton, and Chekhov, as well as to events in Bly's own life.
