Coleman Barks is the bestselling translator of "The Essential Rumi," "The Soul of Rumi," and "Rumi: The Book of Love." He taught creative writing and American poetry in the English Department at the University of Georgia for thirty years and currently lives in Athens, Georgia.
Barks is a master of the complicated human poem. Some poets open
their poems to what is Significant. Barks sets down the remarks
that a waitress said to him one night in a late-night restaurant.
There is a great unfolding of the world here.--Robert Bly
Reading Coleman Barks is the equivalent of a rich transfusion of
vitality. His writings carry a huge generosity of spirit
replenishing everything good, funny, brave, brilliant, honest,
readers could ever hope for. Nothing rejected or shunned, but life
in all its conflicted elegance graciously taken into the circle and
tossed up into new light: one of the widest-open, wildest voices we
might ever embrace.--Naomi Shihab Nye
Why do people read poems? For comfort and a sense of companionship,
for encouragement, for the beauty of language, for energy placed on
the page with a wish to give it away. Coleman Barks is one of the
best. He has given us Rumi. Now he gives us his own work, which is
thoughtful, compassionate, attentive and, at times, positively
frisky. We are all enriched by his presence in this collection of
his own poems. My advice: get a copy as fast as you can and, by the
influence of his voice which honors both the vatic and the
experience of his own singular life, be both comforted and
mindfully enlivened.--Mary Oliver
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