Hafiz, a secret Sufi, came to prominence in his day as a creator of love poems. That love transformed into an all-consuming passion for union with the divine. In The Gift, Daniel Ladinsky bestows on us the impassioned yet whimsical strains of Hafiz’s ecstasy. Never forced or awkward, Ladinsky’s Hafiz whispers in your ear and pounds in your chest, naming God in a hundred metaphors.
I once asked a bird,
“How is it that you fly in this gravity
Of darkness?”
She responded,
“Love lifts
Me.”
Like Fitzgerald’s version of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, the language of The Gift strikes a latest chord, resonating in the reader’s mind and then in the heart. Ladinsky’s language is plain, fresh, playful–dancing with an expert cadence that invites and surprises. If it is true, as Hafiz says, that a poet is someone who can pour light into a cup, reading Ladinsky’s Hafiz is like gulping down the sun. –Brian Bruya
<a href="javascript:void(0)" data-action="a-expander-toggle" class="a-declarative" data-a-expander-toggle="will have to help see that he gets it. Hafiz is so beloved in Iran that he outsells the Koran. Many know his verses by heart and recite them with gusto. And gusto is appropriate to this passionate, earthy poet who melds mind, spirit, and body in each of his on a regular basis brief pensees. Ladinsky has deliberately chosen a loose and colloquial tone for this collection, which might grate on the nerves of purists but makes Hafiz come vividly alive for the average reader. “You carry / The entire ingredients / To turn your life into a nightmare–/ Don’t mix them!” he advises, and “Bottom line: / Do not stop playing / These beautiful / Love / Games.” Nothing is too human for Hafiz to celebrate, for in humanity he finds the prospect of God. In everything from housework to lovemaking, he celebrates the spiritual possibilities of life. A fine and stirring new presentation of one of the crucial world’s great poets. Patricia Monaghan
<a href="javascript:void(0)" data-action="a-expander-toggle" class="a-declarative" data-a-expander-toggle="the most well liked and highly revered poet in Persian history, and renders them into a fresh translation from the Farsi. Like Rumi, Hafiz writes out of the Sufi tradition, and his work bears the Sufi hallmarks of ecstatic spirituality conveyed at once through lush imagery and verbal restraint. His fabulistic, almost didactic style can sound a bit flat at times (How / Do I / Listen to others? / As if everyone were my Master / Speaking to me / His / Last / Words), but there is a religious intensity in his work that is equally fresh and naive (When no one is looking and I want / To kiss / God / I just lift my own hand / To / My / Mouth) and reasonably unlike anything found in the Western tradition (though modern minimalists such as Robert Lax come close). A fine preface by Ladinsky and an excellent introduction by Henry S. Mindlin. — Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
<a href="javascript:void(0)" data-action="a-expander-toggle" class="a-declarative" data-a-expander-toggle="in addition to a collection of translations of poems by twelve mystics and saints, Love Poems From God. His most latest collection is The Purity of Desire: 100 Poems of Rumi. For six years, he made his home in a spiritual community in western India, where he worked and lived with the intimate disciples and family of Avatar Meher Baba. He lives in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
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