Rumi’s Birds of Wonder: the Great Sufi’s Life and Poetry (Selections from Dīvān e Shams)

The ecstatic love poems of Rumi, the world’s most popular poet Rumi has left us thousands of lyric ghazals in Persian, covering every imaginable note and nuance of human experience. Choosing from this multitude of songs is a daunting and revealing task that translator Iraj Anvar has done to perfection in this new collection. In this volume, our Iranian-born translator has opted for the ecstatic, “drunken,” love-struck Rumi whose intoxicating rhythms, breathless urgency, and dizzying epiphanies of spiritual union and transformation are beautifully carried into the twenty-first century. This collection of 104 ghazals is presented in modern English, and their Persian originals are included as well. Together they present Rumi as the world’s timeless, classic interpreter of the human soul’s love-sickness, with lament and deepest longing for love of every kind—divine and human. A thorough and complete Introduction not only “sets the scene” for the poems, but offers an essential glimpse at the life and times of the great poet.