The Pocket Rumi Reader

Edited by Kabir Helminski

Softbound

$6.95

I call this format "waiting room size" because it is so small (3"x4") you can always have a good book with you to read while waiting for anything. This collection of Rumi's most inspiring poetry is so delicious, you'll almost wish it took even longer for your name to be called. Enjoy!

Look! This is Love
Poems of Rumi

Translated by Annemarie Schimmel

Softbound

$12.50

Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), one of the world's most beloved poets, poured out thousands of verses expressing a wonderful, high-soaring love for God. Rendered in rhythmic language, the poems collected in this book echo the enraptured dances created by Rumi and made famous by the whirling dervishes.

Rumi's World
The Life and Work of the Great Sufi Poet

Annemarie Schimmel

Softbound

$16.95

A poetic biography that is the story of both poet and poetry - this is a great introduction to Rumi and the world in which he lived.

This highly readable book reflects a lifetime of scholarly concern and at the same time personal intimacy with the words and world of Rumi. In simple and poetic language the author takes the reader through the cultural heritage of Knoya, where the saint is buried, his life and family, his transfiguring encounter with Shams al-Din Tabrizi, as well as his poetry and mystical teachings along with his unparalleled intellectual and spiritual legacy. Annemarie Schimmel has provided an at once scholarly, poetic, and existentially moving account of the life, works, and spiritual message of that supreme troubadour of Persian Sufi literature and one of the greatest saints of Islam.

- Seyyed Hossein Nasr, University Professor of Islamic Studies, George Washington University

Unseen Rain
Quatrains of Rumi

Translated by
John Moyne & Coleman Barks

Softbound

$11.95

Rumi's short poems have many tones and effects: some of them are quick, joyful, and whimsical; some are finely faceted abstract statements; some probe the inward space of patience and longing. Moyne and Barks provide graceful translations using a free-verse style, connecting these poems with those of great American spiritual poets such as Walt Whitman and Gary Snyder.

Joyful for no reason,
I want to see beyond this existence.

You open your lips, laughing.
I think of a design for that opening.

Feeling the Shoulder of the Lion
Poetry and Teaching Stories of Rumi

Versions by Coleman Barks

Softbound

$11.95

These selections from the poetry of Rumi express the courage and intensity needed to overcome our ego-imprisonment. Much of Rumi's poetry has circled around the mystery of surrender. Some of it expresses a longing and even a bewilderment, but much of it also demonstrates the discipline, clarity, and integrity that true surrender requires. The lion is that fierce intensity that recognizes no authority except the highest truth. Yet the lion is full of heart and devotion. The translator, Coleman Barks, says, "I hear the lion's roar in Rumi, but he certainly didn't stop with that thunderous no to what blocks light, to easy answers and the need to belong. He moved on out into an enormous open, into the creative yes of the child, and beyond."

Ali and Muhammed appear often in this poems and stories. Their leonine attentiveness to the quality of an action, to whether it comes from ego or from the wider Source, opens a new perspective on these figures.

Open Secret

Versions of Rumi by
John Moyne & Coleman Barks

Softbound

$10.95

These quatrains and odes, many appearing here in English for the first time, reveal a most human and accessible side of this great poet and mystic. They are the personal records of one man's encounter with the Divine.

The essential power of Rumi's poetry is ecstasy, an ecstasy melting the confinement of the ego into a larger, elastic, cross-pollinating dance of Selves. His is not the ecstasy of Union, not in the poetry. It is a love-ecstasy mixed with some brokenness and much longing. . . . Rumi is speaking of a fluctuating exchange between beings, and between beings and Being.

- from the Introduction

Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved
100 Poems of Hafiz

Translations by Thomas Rain Crowe

Softbound

$12.95

The Persian Sufi Poet Hafiz (1326-1390) is a towering figure in Islamic literature - and in spiritual attainment as well. Known for his profound mystical wisdom combined with a sublime sensuousness, Hafiz was the supreme master of a poetic form know as the ghazal, an ode or song consisting of rhymed couplets celebrating divine love. In this selection of his poems, wine and the intoxication it brings are the images that express this love in all its joyful abandon, painful yearning, bewilderment, and surrender. Through one hundred free-verse renditions, we gain entry into the mystical world of Hafiz's Winehouse, with its ecstatic minstrels, its bewitching Winebringer, and its companions in drunken longing whose hearts cry out, "More wine!" Thomas Rain Crowe brings a new dimension to the growing appreciation of Hafiz and his wise drunkard's advice to the seekers of God.

Love is a Stranger
Selected Lyric Poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi

Translated by Kabir Helminski

Softbound

$10.95

The garden of love is green without limit
and yields many fruits other than sorrow or joy.
Love is beyond either condition:
without spring, without autumn, it is always fresh.

- Rumi

Jelaluddin Rumi, on of the greatest mystics and poets the world has ever known, said, "Love is a stranger and speaks a strange language." And yet Rumi's message of spiritual love speaks directly to our hearts after more than seven hundred years.

The Rumi Collection

Edited by Kabir Helminski

Softbound

$14.95

Here is a wonderfully rich introduction to the work of the great mystical poet, featuring the leading literary translations of his verse Translators include Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Andrew Harvey, Kabir and Camille Helminski, Daniel Liebert, and Peter Lamborn Wilson. The Rumi Collection also includes a biography of Rumi by Andrew Harvey, as well as an introductory essay by Kabir Helminski on the challenges of translating Rumi into English.