Burning Bright

by Patricia Hampl

Book Overview

O night, you are dark because you do not know Him. O day, go and learn from Him what it means to shine. Rumi This extraordinary daybook of sacred poetry is for everyone, not only readers secure in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345380290
• ISBN13: 9780345380296
• Release Date: November 1995
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 178 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

More Than Meets the Eye

When I first glanced at the sub-title of Burning Bright: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry, I thought the book yet another mediocre, new-age, muzak compilation to trance the reader into a coma. But fortunately I also glanced at the contributors listed on the back of the book: Hopkins, Rilke, Milosz, Ginsberg, Plath, Dickinson, Donne, Tsvetaeva, Yeats. I opened the book to its table of contents and found more names: Blake, Herbert, Celan, and a couple of dozen other outstanding poets both known and unknown to me--ALL heavy-hitters striking home. AT RANDOM, because "choosing" would wrongly suggest an extra giftedness in one poet over the others, here is a sample of the anthology's "burning bright" sacred poetry--the opening stanzas of Gabriela Mistral's "The Liana": In the secret of night, my prayer climbs like the liana, gropes like a blind man, sees more than the owl. Up the stalk of night that you loved, that I love, creeps my torn prayer, rent and mended, uncertain and sure. . . I have translated and published Catullus' bawdy poems and Tu Fu's timeless poems of everyday occurrence, have delighted in the playfulness of Billy Collins' poems and in the erudition of Pound's poems, and enjoyed hundreds of other poets writing dozens of kinds of poetry on every imaginable subject. Which is to say, I've no preferential affinity for spiritual or "sacred" poems, yet, and more frequently, always "Up the night. . .creeps my [own] torn prayer" in soul-search and God-grapple. So, in my library are installed several such anthologies as this one, but none as good.