World Poetry encompasses the many worlds of poetry, poetry of all styles, of all eras, of all tongues: from the ancient epic of Gilgamesh and the Pharaoh Akhnaten's "Hymn to the Sun" to the haiku of Basho and the dazzling imagery of Li Po; from Vedic hymns to Icelandic sagas to the "Carmina Burana"; from the magnificence of Homer and Dante to the lyricism of Goethe and Verlaine; from the piercing insights of Rilke and Yeats to the revelatory verse of Emily Dickinson, Garcia Lorca, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and many more.While World Poetry includes a generous selection of the best English-language verse from Chaucer to the present, it is designed to lay before the reader the best that all the world's cultures have to offer—more than eighty percent of the book is poetry originally written in languages other than English and translated by some of the finest talents working today, many of them brilliant poets in their own right.This is no mere sampler: In choosing only works of the highest intrinsic quality the editors have created a book that will surprise knowledgeable readers and lead newcomers to an understanding of the glories of world poetry that is our common heritage.

    Not much is known about his life except that he lived in thirteenth-century Anatolia (now Turkey), had a great spiritual friendship with a wild man called Shams, brought an adopted daughter into his family, and was distraught when Shams finally disappeared.Rumi's Daughter is the delightful novel about Kimya, the girl who was sent from her rural village to live in Rumi's home. She already had mystical tendencies, and learned a great deal under Rumi's tutelage. Eventually she married Shams, an unusual husband, almost totally absorbed by his longings for God. Their marriage was fiery and different and, in the end, dissolved by Kimya's death - after which Shams vanished.Rumi's Daughter tells Kimya's story with great charm and tenderness. Well written and thought-provoking, it is sure to draw comparison with Paolho Coelho's The Alchemist, and also to add something fresh and new to what is so far known about Rumi.

    P. Cavafy (1863 - 1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature.Here is an extensively revised edition of the acclaimed translations of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, which capture Cavafy's mixture of formal and idiomatic use of language and preserve the immediacy of his frank treatment of homosexual themes, his brilliant re-creation of history, and his astute political ironies. The resetting of the entire edition has permitted the translators to review each poem and to make alterations where appropriate. George Savidis has revised the notes according to his latest edition of the Greek text.About the first edition: The best [English version] we are likely to see for some time.--James Merrill, The New York Review of Books [Keeley and Sherrard] have managed the miracle of capturing this elusive, inimitable, unforgettable voice. It is the most haunting voice I know in modern poetry.--Walter Kaiser, The New Republic ?

    It explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad.Ben Fountain’s remarkable debut novel follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive "Victory Tour" at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.

    Here is the green and carefree world of a boy who delights in the possibilities of each day, of a child who wrings from every moment a feeling as intensely magical as it is profoundly innocent.

    This is the story of Yehoshuah, who wandered Roman-occupied Judea giving sermons and healing the sick. Now, a year after his death, four people tell their stories. His mother grieves, his friend Iehuda loses his faith, the High Priest of the Temple tries to keep the peace, and a rebel named Bar-Avo strives to bring that peace tumbling down. It was a time of political power-play and brutal tyranny. Men and women took to the streets to protest. Dictators put them down with iron force. In the midst of it all, one inconsequential preacher died. And either something miraculous happened, or someone lied.Viscerally powerful in its depictions of the period - massacres and riots, animal sacrifice and human betrayal - The Liars' Gospel makes the oldest story entirely new.

    The key to Williams' mystically oriented theological thought, Descent into Hell (arguably Williams' greatest novel) is a multidimensional story about human beings who shut themselves up in their own narcissistic projections, so that they are no longer able to love, to 'co-inhere.' The result is a veritable hell.

    Going beyond the limits of biography, this text covers the origins, spiritual context and teachings of the great founder of the Whirling Dervishes, but also includes a study of Rumi scholarship throughout the ages, bringing this volume right up to date.

    Rumi lived the quiet life of a religious teacher in Anatolia until the age of thirty-seven, when he came under the influence of a whirling dervish, Shams Tabriz, and was moved to a state of mystical ecstasy. One of the results of this ecstasy was a prodigious output of poems about the search for the lost Divine Beloved, whom Rumi identified with Shams. To symbolize this search, Rumi also invented the famous whirling dance of the Melevi dervishes, which are performed accompanied by the chanting of Rumi's poems. Professor Schimmel illuminates the symbolism and significance of Rumi's vast output and offers her own translations of some of his most famous poems.

     It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you'll go, betray me, strayfrom home.So better by far for me if you were stone.—from "Medusa"Stunningly original and haunting, the voices of Mrs. Midas, Queen Kong, and Frau Freud, to say nothing of the Devil's Wife herself, startle us with their wit, imagination, and incisiveness in this collection of poems written from the perspectives of the wives, sisters, or girlfriends of famous—and infamous—male personages. Carol Ann Duffy is a master at drawing on myth and history, then subverting them in a vivid and surprising way to create poems that have the pull of the past and the crack of the contemporary.

    Nature, man and human history are reflected on in the verse of English and American poets and such prose works as the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence.

    Society's retribution for her act of defiance - death - she welcomes as the only way she can finally be free.