The Gift

Hafiz, a secret Sufi, came to prominence in his day as a writer 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 contemporary 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

• I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy
• A Year with Hafiz: Daily Contemplations
• The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz (Compass)
• Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality
• The Illuminated Hafiz: Love Poems for the Journey to Light
• The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition
• Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West (Compass)
• The Purity of Desire: 100 Poems of Rumi
• The Essential Rumi
• Rumi's Little Book of Life: The Garden of the Soul, the Heart, and the Spirit