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September 14, 2004
Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home
| Title | Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home |  |
| Author | Rumi (translation Coleman Barks with John Moyne) | |
| Publisher | Penguin, London, 1998 | |
| Date | ||
| ISBN | 0 14 019576 9 | |
| Reviewed by | Jane Szita | |
| That America’s best-selling poet of recent years should be a 13th-century wildcard Sufi mystic called Rumi, founder of the brotherhood of the Whirling Dervishes, says something about the spiritual longing and anti-clericalism of our times. Perhaps it also reflects our modern hunger for lightness — a quality which his poetry embodies. Spiritual lightness is its subject — the union of the soul with the infinite in the mystic oneness of all things — and stylistic lightness (economy of expression, refusal to adhere to poetic forms, the use of ‘trivial’ detail) is its trademark. It achieves a remarkable buoyancy of mood — a kind of ecstatic lightheadedness seldom found in Western religious literature, with a few exceptions such as St Theresa of Avila. Rumi dwells on the minute, everyday experiences of life — a child’s laughter, the touch of a hand, leaves moving in the breeze — as manifestations of the great universal truth. He breaks rules, leaves endings open, jumps from one subject to another — but then these are not polished, finished artefacts in the Western sense of ‘poems’. Rumi’s work is more a stream of consciousness, a dialogue with himself, a fluid medium. As he wrote himself, "There is a way between voice and presence Where information flows." | ||
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Posted by Books Editor at September 14, 2004 09:33 PM