Table of Contents

Introduction

Enheduanna, from 'Hymn to Inanna'      
Unknown, 'Death of Enkidu', from The Epic of Gilgamesh                       
Unknown, from The Book of the Dead          
Unknown, Song of Songs, chapters 1 and 2        
King David, Psalm 23                   
Homer, from The Odyssey               
Sappho, Fragments 22 and 118              
Patacara, 'When they plow their fields'          
Lao Tzu, 'Easy by Nature', from Tao Te Ching     
Chandaka, Two Cosmologies               
Vyasa, from the Bhagavad Gita             
Lucretius, from The Nature of Things         
Virgil, from The Aeneid                 
Shenoute, 'Homily'                    
Sengcan, 'The Mind of Absolute Trust'          
From the Quran                      
Kakinomoto Hitomaro, 'In praise of Empress Jit'    
Li Po, 'Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon'        
Rabi'a al-Basri, 'O my lord'             
Ono No Komachi, 'This inn'               
Hanshan, 'Hanshan's Poem'               
Al-Husayn ibn Ahmad ibn Khalawayh, 'Names of the Lion'                   
Unknown, Anglo-Saxon charm              
Izumi Shikibu, 'Things I Want Decided'          
Li Qingzhao, 'Late Spring'                 
Hildegard of Bingen, 'Song to the Creator'        
Mahadeviyakka, 'I do not call it his sign'          
Attar of Nishapur, 'Parable of the Dead Dervishes in the Desert'                      
St Francis of Assisi, 'Canticle of the Sun'         
Wumen Huikai, from The Gateless Gate         
Rm, 'Lift Now the Lid of the Jar of Heaven'       
Mechthild of Magdeburg, 'Of all that God has shown me'                        
Saadi Shirazi, 'The Grass Cried Out'           
Thomas Aquinas, 'Lost, All in Wonder'          
Moses de León, from The Sepher Zohar        
Dante Alighieri, from Inferno, Canto III        
from the Sundiata                   
Hafez, Ghazal 17                     
Yaqui people, 'Deer Song'               
Nezahualcoyotl, 'The Painted Book'          
Kabir, 'Brother, I've seen some'          
Mirabai, 'O friend, understand'             
Yoruba people, from A Recitation of Ifa        
Teresa of Ávila, 'Laughter Came from Every Brick'
Gaspara Stampa, 'Deeply repentant of my sinful ways'
St John of the Cross, 'O Love's living flame'
Mayan people, from the Popol Vuh
Christopher Marlowe, from Faustus
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146
John Donne, 'Batter my heart, three-person'd God'
Nahuatl people, 'The Midwife Addresses the Woman'
George Herbert, 'Easter Wings'
Walatta Petros/Gälawdewos, from The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros
John Milton, from Paradise Lost, Book 4
Bash, 'Death Song' and 'In Kyoto'
Juana Inés de la Cruz, 'Suspend, singer swan, the sweet strain'
Yosa Buson, 'A solitude'
Olaudah Equiano, 'Miscellaneous Verses'
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 'Wanderer's Nightsong II'
Phillis Wheatley, 'On Virtue'
William Blake, 'Auguries of Innocence'
Kobayashi Issa, 'All the time I pray to Buddha'
John Clare, 'I Am!'
John Keats, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'
Mirza Ghalib, 'For the Raindrop'
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 'Grief'
Frederick Douglass, 'A Parody'
Emily Dickinson, 'I prayed, at first, a little Girl'     
Uvavnuk, 'The Great Sea'                
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'God's Grandeur'       
Rabindranath Tagore, 'The Temple of Gold'       
Constantine Cavafy, 'Body, Remember'         
W. B. Yeats, 'The Second Coming'            
Rainer Maria Rilke, 'The Second Duino Elegy'      
Muhammad Iqbal, 'These are the days of lightning'   
Yosano Akiko, 'To punish'                
Sarojini Naidu, 'In the Bazaars of Hyderabad'      
Delmira Agustini, 'Inextinguishables'          
Gabriela Mistral, 'The Return'              
Anna Akhmatova, from 'Requiem'            
Osip Mandelstam, 'O Lord, help me to live through this night'                   
Edith Södergran, 'A Life'                 
Marina Tsvetaeva, from Poems to Czechia      
María Sabina, from 'The Midnight Velada'        
Xu Zhimo, 'Second Farewell to Cambridge'       
Federico García Lorca, 'Farewell'            
Nâzim Hikmet, 'Things I Didn't Know I Loved'      
Léopold Sédar Senghor, 'Totem'             
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 'Before You Came'          
Czesaw Miosz, 'Dedication'              
Edmond Jabès, 'At the Threshold of the Book'     
Aimé Césaire, from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land                   
Octavio Paz, 'Brotherhood: Homage to Claudius Ptolemy'                   
Oodgeroo Noonuccal, 'God's One Mistake'       
Paul Celan, 'There was Earth in Them'          
Paul Laraque, 'Rainbow'                 
Nazik Al-Malaika, 'Love Song for Words'        
Wisawa Szymborska, 'Astonishment'          
Zbigniew Herbert, 'The Envoy of Mr Cogito'      
Yehuda Amichai, 'A Man in His Life'          
Ingeborg Bachmann, 'Every Day'            
Kim Nam-Jo, 'Foreign Flags'              
Kamau Brathwaite, 'Bread'                
Adonis, 'The New Noah'                 
Christopher Okigbo, 'Come Thunder'          
Ingrid Jonker, 'There Is Just One Forever'        
Jean Valentine, 'The River at Wolf'            
Kofi Awoonor, 'At the Gates'            
Adélia Prado, 'Dysrhythmia'               
Lucille Clifton, 'my dream about God'          
Vénus Khoury-Ghata, from She Says         
Mahmoud Darwish, 'I Didn't Apologize to the Well'   
M. NourbeSe Philip, from Zong!           
Inrasara, from Allegory of the Land          

Sources                          
Acknowledgements                    
Index of First Lines                    
Index of Titles                       

Review

If poetry is prayer, here are scriptures. Kaveh Akbar's brave, encompassing map of spiritual hunger shows us that longing belongs to all of us, whatever the languages we speak or the geographies we inhabit -- Jeet Thayil
An amazing collection of spiritual verse from many cultures and periods, from ancient Sumer in the third millennium BCE up to the present. There cannot be any other anthology that ranges so widely, and anyone concerned with either poetry or spirituality will want to own a copy -- John Barton * author of A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths *
Wonderfully rich, this beautiful anthology of verse uniquely displays how humans over centuries and across continents have wrestled with the concept of the divine and, in turn, humanity's relationship with that divinity. From exaltation to lament, from reflections on beauty to explorations of science, these words draw the reader's eyes towards the wonder of the numinous. A delightful celebration of human creativity, with new insights from a trusted guide: Kaveh Akbar -- Chine McDonald * director of Theos and author of God Is Not a White Man: And Other Revelations *
What an amazing compilation: beautifully edited, translated, introduced, this book is far more than a typical poetry anthology. What is it, then? It is our chance to overhear the splendid poet Kaveh Akbar whisper to himself words which he lives by, as he embarks on his own journey of spirit, loss, astonishment, bewilderment, and, perhaps, understanding. The chorus of voices gathered offer a balm, a consolation, a tune, in our desolate world -- Ilya Kaminsky * author of Deaf Republic *
How can language approach the spiritual - that which remains unlanguaged - and trace the limen between the self and what it falls silent before? In The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse, Kaveh Akbar takes up this timeless inquiry with expansive curatorial shaping and heady joy, threading together Li Po and Adelia Prado, Hafez with Jabès, reverent with ludic, divine with corporeal, and everything that gets charged through, and between, them. Vibrating across this thick bundle of verse is the animation of the spirit enmeshed with the body, astounding in its ever-shifting forms, its irrepressible music. These poems "thin the partition between a person and a divine," and they do so sublimely: making porous the border between the self and all that beckons beyond understanding -- Jenny Xie
The choices Kaveh Akbar has made for this anthology of spiritual verse are spectacularly excellent. They are from regions of poetry at once accessible and exalted, representing the most intense of human experiences, the experiences of the divine, the yearning for the holy . . . The book holds an embarrassment of riches, yet is light on its feet. You can easily carry it with you in an outside pocket of your knapsack. You too will be smitten by the yearning that animates and drives these poems. Akbar's Introduction, and his notes on individual poems, are extra added value: the words of a poet -- Alicia Ostriker * New York State Poet Laureate 2018-2021, author of the volcano and after:Selected and New Poems, 2002-2019 *

Review Quote

What an amazing compilation : beautifully edited, translated, introduced, this book is far more than a typical poetry anthology. What is it, then? It is our chance to overhear the splendid poet Kaveh Akbar whisper to himself words which he lives by, as he embarks on his own journey of spirit, loss, astonishment, bewilderment, and, perhaps, understanding. The chorus of voices gathered offer a balm, a consolation, a tune, in our desolate world.

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