RUMI CL

Championed by the likes of Madonna, Donna Karan, and Deepak Chopra, Rumi has won such a following in this country that a few years ago he was proclaimed our bestselling poet. Collections of his poetry have sold in the hundreds of thousands. But translations that have popularized the work of this thirteenth-century Sufi poet and mystic, giving it a sort of post-hippie, New Age appeal, have also strayed from its essence. In this new translation, Farrukh Dhondy seeks to recover both the lyrical beauty and the spiritual essence of the original verse. In poems of love and devotion, rapture and suffering, loss and yearning for oneness, Dhondy has rediscovered the Islamic mystic of spiritual awakening whose quest is the key to his universal appeal. Here is at once a great poet of love, both human and divine, and the authentic voice of a moderate Islam-a voice that can resonate in today's turbulent, fundamentalist times.