When we encounter real tragedy in our lives that throws us into grieving, few of us find the way to deepen our mourning and let it radically reform us. The Soul in Grief asks us to put aside all psychological explanations and concentrate on discovering the loving embrace offered by the soul of the world.
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Best review for The Soul in Grief: Love, Death, and Transformation
Robert Bly’s ground-breaking anthology of spiritual poems, the result of over a decade of personal research, celebrates the ongoing role of the divine in literature. For as long as people have lived together in communities and built enduring cultures, they have sung and written about their relationship with the God or gods they believed in. In the words of the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain, “all good writing in the end is the writer’s argument with God.”
The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy gathers poems from a wide range of cultures and traditions and divides them into ten parts, each forming a resonant exploration of a specific and timeless spiritual question. Selections include the work of Dante, Dogen, Goethe, Hafez, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Kabir, Lalla, Li Po, Mirabai, Mary Oliver, Owl Woman, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Rumi, in addition to Blake, Dickinson, Donne, Hopkins, Stevens, Yeats, and other important English and American poets. Together these poems form both a celebration and a quest–a kind of pilgrim’s progress that embraces all the rich wisdom of East and West, ancient and modern, male and female, spirit and flesh.
Best review for The Soul is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures
“The presumption of a deep link between Rilke’s art and the fount of psychology can draw upon biographical–as well as theoretical and textual–evidence. Rilke’s life and work were, from the beginning, ineluctably entwined with intellectual historical developments that signaled the surfacing of psyche, the (re)emerging of the soul to consciousness. Born in the same year (1875) as the great Godfather of archetypal psychology, Carl Jung, Rilke’s own formative years coincided with those of the professional field of psychology itself. In 1897, when he met Lou Salomé (who was later to become a colleague and confidante of Freud), Rilke encountered, through her, ideas about psychology, religion, and art that revolutionized his thinking.” (from the introduction)
Taking James Hillman’s notion of “soul history” to heart, Rilke: A Soul History tells the inner story of Rilke’s literary career, tracing, step-by-step, the mythopoetic journey inscribed in the interweaving lines of the poet’s life and art.
Artfully blending biography with in-depth analyses of Rilke’s poetry and prose (from his little-known Visions of Christ through the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus), the lively and engaging narrative draws upon not only Hillman’s archetypal psychology but also Plato and Petrarch, Apuleius and Augustine, Ibn ‘Arabi and Lou Andreas-Salomé, as it unfolds the poet-seer’s compelling vision of the nature and destiny of the human soul–a vision as timely as it is timeless.
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Best review for Rilke, A Soul History: In the Image of Orpheus
