The poems inHummingbird Sleep move associatively between Coleman Barks's personal experience and his extensive reading, weaving together a wild and eclectic range of material. A discussion of Plotinus, Barks's appearance on PBS NewsHour, a note Keats once left on Wordsworth's mantelpiece, a splinter in the heel, and a quote from the Upanishads-all make their way into Barks's most recent poems, which achieve intimacy and expansiveness at the same time.
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Hummingbird Sleep: Poems, 2009-2011
The poems inHummingbird Sleep move associatively between Coleman Barks's personal experience and his extensive reading, weaving together a wild and eclectic range of material. A discussion of Plotinus, Barks's appearance on PBS NewsHour, a note Keats once left on Wordsworth's mantelpiece, a splinter in the heel, and a quote from the Upanishads-all make their way into Barks's most recent poems, which achieve intimacy and expansiveness at the same time.
The poems inHummingbird Sleep move associatively between Coleman Barks's personal experience and his extensive reading, weaving together a wild and eclectic range of material. A discussion of Plotinus, Barks's appearance on PBS NewsHour, a note Keats once left on Wordsworth's mantelpiece, a splinter in the heel, and a quote from the Upanishads-all make their way into Barks's most recent poems, which achieve intimacy and expansiveness at the same time.
COLEMAN BARKS is the best-selling translator of The Essential Rumi The Soul of Rumi, and Rumi: The Book of Love and author of numerous volumes of poetry including Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008 (Georgia). He taught creative writing and American poetry in the English Department at the University of Georgia for thirty years and currently lives in Athens, Georgia.
COLEMAN BARKS is the best-selling translator of The Essential Rumi The Soul of Rumi, and Rumi: The Book of Love and author of numerous volumes of poetry including Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008 (Georgia). He taught creative writing and American poetry in the English Department at the University of Georgia for thirty years and currently lives in Athens, Georgia.
Table of Contents
Starting Out From
Ted Hughes’ Letters My Face and My Voice Lightning Bugs and the Pleiades My Segment on the NewsHour Accordion Sections Our Next Dying Word Choice Snow Day, the Word God, and the Threat of the Power Going Off Old Men Out Walking Inbetween Deaths The Splinter and the Riversticks The Scar on the Back of My Right Hand The Tuesday before Thanksgiving Tuck’s Coach Piecemeal Rise & Fall November Nights A Perfect New Moon Working Parts Boscage Iron-Knocking Catkins Darling Celery Hearts Two Squirrel Stories There Ain’t Nothing Like It He said, Benjamin my son said, . . . Salinger in Arabic Peter O’Callahan’s Dream of Me Not Being Here Witness A Sky-Opening Middle Falls Occasional Seagull Hummingbird Sleep The VOICE inside WATER Got to Stop What I Am Sure Of Coffeehouse Notes Fox Robert and Noah Original Sins It Is Raining with the Sun Out Blessing-Bow Anytime Midafternoon Midsummer We Laugh Together The Gift of a Comeback Heavy Rain in the Parking Lot Wittgenstein Grief in the Tub
"A mighty book. A rain dance between Plotinus and the grandeur of an Athens snowfall. Hummingbird Sleep is so good I have taken up residence in it. Barks is writing out where the buses don't park. This is his finest work yet: intimate, touched with grief, but with a great intensity of wonder. The whole affair carries a pirate's joy for life."—Martin Shaw, author of A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness, winner of the Nautilus Book Award
"One of the most moving meditations on aging, living, and dying I've ever read. These poems will befriend, comfort, and delight you. Something very magical happens as Coleman Barks overlays dreaming and waking life . . . memory and present . . . you can taste these poems while reading them."—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Transfer
