The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine,
ed. Kaveh Akbar
Penguin Books, 2022
Yes,
the roster is stacked, and I’m not about to call into question the extracts
from the Epic of Gilgamesh,
Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” or the fragments by Sappho that are rightly
included in this anthology alongside bits from The Egyptian Book of the Dead,
The Psalms and poems by Li Po, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Octavio
Paz, Frederica Garcia Lorca, Hafez, Ono No Komachi, Lucille Clifton, and
numerous other masters and masterworks. This thing taps right into the
mainline. However, while many of the poets here will be familiar if you’ve been
into poetry for a while, and some are outright mandatory reading, it’s nice
that Akbar often chooses poems that are less anthologized—Blake’s “Auguries of
Innocence” rather than “The Tiger,” Rilke’s second Duino Elegy in its
entirety as opposed to “Archaic Torso of Apollo” to name just two examples. But
wait—nothing from “Four Quartets?” No Gnostic texts like the spell-binding “The
Thunder, Perfect Mind?” Not a single verse from The Lotus Sutra? Don’t
worry—in their stead there are things here you’ve never encountered before,
such as “The Painted Book” by 15th century, pre-Columbian
Mesoamerican ruler and poet Nezahualcoyotl, that are equally enchanting:
With
flowers You write
O
Giver of Life:
with
songs You give color,
with
songs You shade
those
who must live on the earth.
Later
You will destroy eagles and ocelots:
we
live only in Your book of paintings,
here,
on the earth…
(trans. Miguel Leon-Portilla)
The most interesting thing to think about when discussing a book like this isn’t why it doesn’t always adhere to one’s own personal canon, but the particular conversations the poems that are there begin to have alongside one another. In curating this anthology, Akbar has taken a chronological, rather than a geographic or cultural, approach that produces some thought-provoking thematic through-lines and energizing shifts in sensibility. In the pages immediately following “The Painted Book,” for instance, is a surreal, delightfully riddling untitled poem by the Indian mystic and saint Kabir written in roughly the same era:
Brother, I’ve
seen some
Astonishing sights:
A lion keeping
watch
Over pasturing cows;
A mother
delivered
After her son was;
A guru prostrated
Before his disciple;
Fish spawning
On treetops…
(trans. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra)
These poets, separated by both a literal and metaphorical ocean, which might’ve well been a galaxy, are both trying to get at their experience of the divine through poetry in startlingly different ways. I share Akbar’s sentiments when he points out in his introduction that “Rumi and Dante were living at the same time, gasping at the same stars-the mind reels!” While the two legends never met, they do, in a sense, have a chance to speak to one another in the pages of this book, and there are many other conversations going on. When I encountered the poem “Astonishment” by the great Polish poet Wisława Szymborska two hundred pages later, I felt the presence of Kabir’s sense of wonder:
What is it really
made me appear
neither an inch
nor half a globe too far,
neither a minute
nor aeons too early?
What made me fill
myself with me so squarely?
(trans. Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak)
These kind of charged correspondences are by no means rare in this anthology, and it’s nice to have some less-familiar voices among the marquee names to see what they have to say to one another.
The
Tao Te Ching, the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Ghita—while
it’s a pleasure to check in with them, for the most part the excerpts included
here send you back to the source texts. The true value of this book is in
finding new companions, such as the Buddhist disciple Patacara’s questioning
and clear-eyed look at the nature of enlightenment: “Why haven’t I found peace
? […] / When the lamp went out / my mind was freed.” Or the evocative opening
line of the untitled poem by Muhammad Iqbal (“These are the days of
lightning…”) that culminates in an assertion that “faith” itself will
“renourish the garden.” Or the “Deer Song” of the Yaqui people that uses its
incantatory rhythms to remind us that the human and animal realms are bound
together through the mysteries of nature: “There he comes out, / there from the
enchanted house, / I come out from there...” Bounding ahead several centuries,
I was particularly taken with the four pages of “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved”
by Turkish poet Nàzim Hikmet, a writer banished from his homeland for nearly
thirty years whose work I’d never encountered, and immediately searched out his
Selected Poems—generating this kind of newfound enthusiasm is all I can
really ask of any anthology. The four-page poem describes his night journey on
a train passing through what was then Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe:
…the train
plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I
loved the night pitch-black
sparks fly from
the engine
I didn’t know I
loved sparks
I didn’t know I
loved so many things and had to wait until sixty
to find it out
sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
watching the world disappear as if on a
journey of no return
(trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konu)
If the poem might appear to be nominally secular—it makes no mention of god, gods, or anything else in that vein—, its inclusion in this anthology speaks to its broader conception of what constitutes “the divine.” In this fleeting life, everything is charged with meaning, and the speaker’s embrace of both the dark and the light, the movement of time and the singular moments of which it’s made has stayed with me. Hikmet, like Basho, reminds us that the divine can be found in the here and now if we are willing to pay attention.
Okay,
I have to admit I had initially had some suspicions about the publication of
this book being brought out by the giant beast that is Penguin —one need only
glance online to see how the “spirituality” and “the divine” have become a
brand, which is perhaps nothing new. However, The Penguin Book of Spiritual
Verse does well in offering a deeper engagement with and broader conception
of divinity, and, along with expressions of ecstasy and awe, there are hells
here, too. Paradise Lost. Totalitarianism and the Holocaust haunt the
poems of Czesław Miłosz, and Paul Celan. “The mistake,”
in Aboriginal Australian poet Oodergoo Noonuccal’s poem “God’s One Mistake,”
turns out to be giving humanity free will given what it has elected to do with
it. Presciently, this anthology also includes poems by the Russian poets Anna
Akhmatova and Ossip Mandelstam, both of whose lives were tragically altered by
the Stalinist Russian regime, Akhmatova’s husband and son dying in Siberian
labor camps, Mandelstam dying en route to one. In the first Epilogue of her Requiem,
Akhmatova metaphorically links her country’s struggles to the history of human
“suffering” through the image of ancient Sumerian and Babylonian texts written
on cuneiform over 4000 years ago:
I
learned how faces fall,
How
terror darts from under eyelids,
How
suffering traces lines
Of
stiff cuneiform on cheeks
[…]
I
pray not for myself alone,
But
for all those who stood there with me
In
cruel cold, and in July’s heat
At
that blind, red wall.
(trans. Judith Hemschemeyer)
Akhmatova shows us the power of prayer to connect one to empathy and the collective, but the tension between the speaker’s faith and God’s resounding silence in the face of immense suffering is palpable and echoes through the ages. The first poem in the P.B.O.S.V., and the first known work of all literature, is the Sumerian “Hymn to Inanna” by the 23rd century BCE poet and priestess Enheduanna. While the “Hymn to Innana” also offers praise and expresses worshipful awe at the goddess, the extract Akbar has included highlights the struggles and anxieties of this highly sophisticated culture that eventually destroyed itself by the overconsumption and misuse of natural resources, namely water:
Like a dragon,
You poisoned the
land-
When you roared
at the earth
In your thunder,
Nothing green
could live.
A flood fell from
the mountain:
You, Inanna,
Foremost in
Heaven and Earth.
Lady riding a
beast,
You rained fire
on the heads of men.
(trans. Jane Hirshfield)
It’s eye-opening to see how the various incarnations and archetypes the divine has manifested throughout history serve as vessels for not only personal and cultural beliefs, values, and desires, but also their fears and anxieties. Given ongoing wars and the environmental collapse, many of these poems remind us why spiritual poetry has also been called “wisdom literature”—these poems continue to have much to teach us.
Homer
summoned the muses to guide the creation of his epics. Blake saw the Prophet
Ezekiel under a tree as a young boy and continued to have visions that informed
his art for the rest of his life. Rilke got the opening lines addressing the
angels in his Duino Elegies from a voice in the wind. Uvavnuk, the 19th
century Inuk oral poet who spoke her poems in Inuktitut, gained her Shamanistic
powers of vision and speech after a meteor entered her body. In this poem, she
captures a sense of how the power of nature lifts her spirit to a state of
self-transcendence, offering her an access point to the ecstatic:
The great sea
frees me, moves me,
as a strong river carries a weed.
Earth and her strong winds
move me, take me away,
and my soul is swept up in joy.
(trans. Jane Hirshfield)
To give oneself over to the cosmological “great sea” and be “swept up in joy”—isn’t the mysterious power of language itself what drives all great poetry? In contrast to the kind of “certainty” evident in our current political discourse and systems of violence and oppression, Akbar says that he was “drawn to poems that were certain of nothing […] poems that embraced mystery instead of trying to resolve it.” Personally, I place my highest faith in Keats’s notion of “Negative Capability,” which some have linked to Taoist philosophy, that urges in us a willingness to “be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” when one enters the realm of art—a willingness to simultaneously be radically present while opening oneself up to possibility. The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse serves as a welcome reminder that poetry has always been a space of the ineffable, the indescribable, the transcendent, and that one needn’t be a “Believer,” though one could be, to have a spiritual experience through the erotic reaching towards the invisible, the wrestling with the gods, the shout into the void, the Way, the prayer, the spell, the whirling dervish that is a poem:
Disappear inside
the Divine –
There you will
find freedom.
There is nothing
outside that unity.
Stop boasting.
Shut up and lose yourself;
there is no
greater honor
than losing the
ego for love.
(Attar of Nishapur. Trans. Sholeh Wolpe)
Nathan Mader is from Saskatchewan and lives in Kyoto. His poems have been in The Fiddlehead, Plenitude, The Ex-Puritan, The Antigonish Review, PRISM, The New Quarterly, and The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 (Tightrope Books). The Endless Animal, his first full-length collection, is forthcoming in winter 2023 from Fine Period Press.