The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door
Thirty Poems of Hafez
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
One of our most acclaimed poets brings the work of the great Persian mystic and poet, Hafez, to a new audience.
There is no poet in our tradition who carries the amount of admiration and devotion that the Persians have for Hafez. Children learn to sing Hafez poems in the third grade, and almost every family has a copy of the collected Hafez on the dining room table. Robert Bly and the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn have worked for 15 years on this book of Hafez, the first that carries into English his nimbleness, his outrageous humor, his defenses of the private life in the face of the fundamentalists, and the joy of his love poems. He writes in the ghazal form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry. This is Rumi’s wild younger brother, now brought into an English that makes his genius visible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The medieval Persian mystical poet Hafez used sinuous lines and ringing metaphors to write about wisdom, the dangers of repression and the paradoxes of his faith. His blend of simplicity and challenge makes him the most popular poet in Iran today. Bly and Lewisohn (a world-class Sufism expert) present clear and memorable versions of Hafez's renowned lyric meditations, though they forgo the original ghazal form (with its intricate repetitions) in favor of unrhymed pentameters. Sometimes their Hafez offers good advice: "Let's be faithful to what we love./ And keep our spirits high." Sometimes he describes his warmth and contentment: "The delight of a few words/ With a soul friend for us is enough." Just as often, though, he shows how the ways of his seeking, and the distance between divine immanence and earthly travail, can disturb even the most sincere follower: "Don't imagine us to be like the tulip," he concludes; "rather look at the dark/ Spot of grief we have set on our scorched hearts." Though Hafez does not (yet) have the immense Western popularity of that other Sufi mystic, Rumi, his verse has all the ingredients to make a similar splash.
