These Branching Moments: Forty Odes by Rumi

Poetry. Translated from the Persian by John Moyne and Coleman Barks. These are the first English translations in nearly a hundred years of the great 13th-century Sufi poet's finest odes. At once clear and mysterious, passionate and idealistic, witty and profound, they are filled with down-to-earth images of time transcended. For Rumi, life is not a pointless series of discrete events but a tree of "branching moments." The way to discover this truth, his poems reveal, is to follow the mystical via affirmative, whereby true happiness is found not by rejecting the world but by plunging into it and, instead of getting lost in its many splendors, finally rejoicing in - and joining forces with - its underlying oneness. Rumi's vision of the ultimate unity of all things, especially of Islamic, Judeo-Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist thought, speaks to our own fragmented age, and these spirited versions render his search for peace as exhilarating as it is enlightening.