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

    by Rumi, Coleman Barks (Translator), John Moyne (With), Reynold Nicholson (With), A. J. Arberry (With)

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    • ISBN-13: 9780060750503
    • Publisher: HarperCollins
    • Publication date: 01/18/2005
    • Edition description: Reprint
    • Pages: 240
    • Sales rank: 33,999
    • Product dimensions: 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

    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.

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    Rumi: The Book of Love
    Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

    1. Spontaneous Wandering

    I take down my King James to look up the passage about love (charity) in 1 Corinthians 13. There is a tiny red ant living in Corinth. It walks to the top and along the gold edges. Spontaneous wandering is a favorite region of the heart. It may look like mindless drift, but it isn't. More the good Don and Sancho out for their inspired adventures, quixotic and panzaic. The ant is my teacher.

    We see through a glass darkly, then face-to-face. A more polished mirror shows us who we truly are. The wandering of Rumi's poetry is a model for the soul's lovely motions. When thirst begins to look for water, water has already started out with a canteen, looking for thirst. Love feels like sliding along the eddies and currents of the tao.

    Pir Vilayat Khan recently commented to me, "Your first Rumi volumes seemed very sexual." He's right. There is too much of that energy in the first work with Rumi I did, especially in some of the quatrains. I was very wet with such water at the time myself. I was thirty-nine. Now I'm sixty-five. Things change; nothing wrong with that. What's truly alive is always changing.

    Gay lovers hear Rumi's poetry as gay. I don't agree, though I'm certainly guilty of previously loading Rumi's poetry with erotic fruit. I don't do that now. Rumi is way happier than sex and orgasms, his wandering more conscious and free. See "Imra'u 'l-Qays" in the next section. Rumi and Shams wander in that country.

    Perhaps the purest wanderer of our time is Nanao, like Basho in his. Gary Snyder says about him,

    This subtropical East China Sea carpenter and spear fisherman finds himself equally at home in the desert. So much so that on one occasion when an eminent traditional Buddhist priest boasted of his lineage, Nanao responded, "I need no lineage. I am desert rat." But for all his independence Nanao Sakaki carries the karma of Chungtzu, En-no-gyoja, Saigyo, Ikkyu, Basho, and Issa in his bindle. His work or play in the world is to pull out nails, free seized nuts, break loose the rusted, open up the shutters. You can put these poems in your shoes and walk a thousand miles.

    Go with Muddy Feet

    When you hear dirty story
    wash your ears.
    When you see ugly stuff
    wash your eyes.
    When you get bad thoughts
    wash your mind.
    and
    Keep your feet muddy.
    -- Nanao Sakaki

    Excuse my wandering.
    How can one be orderly with this?
    It's like counting leaves in a garden,

    along with the song notes of partridges,
    and crows. Sometimes organization
    and computation become absurd.

    Five Things

    I have five things to say,
    five fingers to give into your grace.

    First, when I was apart from you,
    this world did not exist, nor any other.

    Second, whatever I was looking for
    was always you.

    Third, why did I ever learn to count to three?

    Fourth, my cornfield is burning!

    Fifth, this finger stands for Rabia,
    and this is for someone else.
    Is there a difference?

    Are these words or tears?
    Is weeping speech?
    What shall I do, my love?

    So the lover speaks, and everyone around
    begins to cry with him, laughing crazily,
    moaning in the spreading union
    of lover and beloved.

    This is the true religion. All others
    are thrown-away bandages beside it.

    This is the sema of slavery and mastery
    dancing together. This is not-being.

    I know these dancers.
    Day and night I sing their songs
    in this phenomenal cage.

    Rumi: The Book of Love
    Poems of Ecstasy and Longing    . Copyright © by Coleman Barks. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

    What People are Saying About This

    Roger Housden

    “Another perfect gem from the master translator of Rumi’s poetry.”

    Robert Bly

    “It’s a mystery how heart can come into apparently simple English.”

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    Choose Expedited Delivery at checkout for delivery by. Friday, November 22

    Now in paperback, this is the definitive collection of America's bestselling poet Rumi's finest poems of love and lovers. In Coleman Barks' delightful and wise renderings, these poems will open your heart and soul to the lover inside and out.

    ′There are lovers content with longing.

    I'm not one of them.′

    Rumi is best known for his poems expressing the ecstasies and mysteries of love of all kinds - erotic, divine, friendship -and Coleman Barks collects here the best of those poems, ranging 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 - these poems cover all 'the magnificent regions of the heart′.

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    Robert Bly
    It’s a mystery how heart can come into apparently simple English.
    Roger Housden
    Another perfect gem from the master translator of Rumi’s poetry.
    bn.com
    Poet/translator Coleman Barks believes that the poetry of Rumi reflects the transcendent yearnings that we all feel; but how many of us are as articulate about these longings as the 13th-century Sufi poet? In Barks's lithe and supple version of The Book of Love, one understands how this Middle East explorer of mystical ecstasy became an American standard.
    Publishers Weekly
    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. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
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