The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine

by Kaveh Akbar

An inspiring new selection of poems exploring faith and the divine, featuring poets from across the world, from antiquity to the present, compiled by renowned poet Kaveh Akbar

A Penguin Classic

Poets have always looked to the skies for inspiration, and have written as a way of getting closer to the power and beauty they sense in nature, in each other and in the cosmos. This anthology is a holistic and global survey of a lyric conversation about the divine, one which has been ongoing for millennia.

Beginning with the earliest attributable author in all of human literature, the twenty-third century BC Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna, and taking in a constellation of voices - from King David to Lao Tzu, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Malian Epic of Sundiata - this selection presents a number of canonical voices like Blake, Dickinson and Tagore, alongside lesser-anthologized diverse voices going up to the present day, that showcase the breathtaking multiplicity of ways humanity has responded to the divine across place and time.

These poets' voices commune between millenia, offering readers a chance to experience for themselves the vast and powerful interconnectedness of these incantations orbiting the most elemental of all subjects - our spirit.

Genres: Poetry, Spirituality, Religion, Philosophy, Classics, Anthologies, Fiction

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2022

About the author

Kaveh Akbar's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, PBS NewsHour, A Public Space, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the founder and editor of Divedapper, a home for dialogues with vital voices in contemporary poetry.

His first full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, was published in 2017.

Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Iowa. He was a visiting professor at Purdue University in Indiana in Fall 2017.

Reviews

[April Lundquist · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Language is just a cast moulded over the silence we are really meant to be hearing.”

[Ben Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Divine Collection

This is an absolutely beautiful collection, nourishing for the soul, and full of deep wisdom and insight. A collection which draws on centuries worth of spiritual poetry, from nations all over the earth, from all faiths, but is never once dogmatic or preachy. It was simply a pleasure to read every page of this. Highly recommended.

[Seher · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you review something you’re in love with?


Everyone needs a copy of this book!

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

⇝ 4.5 stars

[John Kameas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Feeling spiritual af after this one!!! Favourites from the collection:
- The mind of absolute trust
- Names of the lion (actually more of a novelty I tried to say the transliterated arabic to my mum and she told me to go away)
- (Titleless) Kabir’s poem on pg 125
- For the raindrop
- Body, remember
- At the threshold of the book
- Astonishment
- The envoy of mr cogito
- A man in his life

[Benny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this collection!!! My one gripe is that I wish this had not been chronological, and instead organised by theme, but that's a personal preference and I understand the utility of keeping the poems in order. Yum yum

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes a book is just so good, I have to read it standing up.

[Ville Verkkapuro · Rating 5 out of 5]

A case of one of those books that find you. I swear it looked at me from the shelves, whispering something to me. So I grabbed it an ran!
(I did beeb my library card first, though...)
I had no idea that this was based on a personal story of Kaveh Akbar, his substance abuse problems, or I guess mostly alcohol, the worst one of all.
I was drawn on the movement of the stars and the call of the divine from the cover. But inside this I found something else; a deep sense of longing, solitude, love and calling for the beyond.
"All my life my heart has sought a thing I cannot name", a poem by Andre Breton (which is NOT INCLUDED in this book) kind of crystallises everything about this book to me.

Some favourite lines and poems:

Now that all belongs to the past,
it is almost as if you had yielded
to those desires too -- remember,
how they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.
– Cavafy

But I’ve done everything right
and followed the rule of my teacher
I’m not lazy or proud
Why haven’t I found peace?
– Patacara

My beautiful mouth knows only confusion.
Even my sex is dust.
– Enheduanna

And last but not least, by Keats:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all.

Read in par with Denial of Death by Ernest Becker made me think that I deeply feel the essence and the pains of being a human being.
A human in the world, what a drag.

[Lizard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah I loved it. Certainly planted a seed of awe + wonder that I hope will continue to blossom in me throughout the new year :)

I really need to read more translated poetry. I find myself returning to a lot of these.

[Noelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If only we had remained simple Clay or Ember,
Or something in between,
Then we would not have to see
This World, it’s Lord, and it’s Hell, twice over.”

- Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), from his poem ‘The New Noah’

[Mary Elizabeth Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning and so thoughtfully curated. Akbar's descriptions of each poet make you want to research them even further.

[Ella · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is not one star for the poetry, which, for the most part, is lovely, and includes a lot of the sorts of people you’d expect in this kind of anthology, but rather for the curation, organisation, and editorial material. Here’s the thing: I find the whole idea of a universal ‘spiritual verse’ anthology organised along simple chronological lines to be both obnoxiously close to new age nonsense and actively antithetical to enjoying the poetry as it’s meant to be enjoyed. Spiritual verse is often highly influenced by the regions and religions that feed it, and though I know Penguin anthologies like their chronological organisation, I really felt that this could have benefitted from being organised via theme, faith, or geography. I for one would have gotten a lot more out of, say, the excerpt from the Book of the Dead being placed next to things like the Thunder, Perfect Mind and the Isis Aretalogies, or other poems about naming and identifying the divine cross-culturally than I did from just lumping it in by a bunch of other ancient verse. Imagining this book organised along the lines of different themes, things like ‘naming the divine’, ‘spiritual eroticism’, ‘the absence of the divine’, ‘spiritual light’, that sort of thing makes me long for what could have been a pretty darn good anthology, instead of the insipid thing we have here.

Secondly, while I liked a lot of the poetry, I thought a fair amount of it was extremely basic pulls for something self-admittedly trying to be different, and many of the less basic selections I recognised (like the Mechthild of Magdeburg stuff) were extremely non-representative samples of the poet in question’s work (The Flowing Light of the Godhead is often unabashedly erotic, like the other works of the Helfta mystics, and it seems a missed opportunity to not pull from that part of the corpus). On a similar note, perhaps a more positive one, I did appreciate that many of the translations used here were more recent— kudos to Akbar for using Newman’s Hildegard translations as opposed to Matthew Fox or someone similar. On the other hand, the Dante translation he picked was just embarrassing— I keep hearing ‘welcome to the grave cave’ in Jenny Nicholson’s ‘oh yeah, the GRIIIIIIIIIIID’ voice in my head at inopportune moments. Surely there’s a better translation out there that you could have gotten the rights to! (Also, if I were editing this I probably would have pulled from Purgatorio or the end of Paradiso for the Dante selection, not the beginning of Inferno, but that’s a me thing).

Finally, the banal, incurious editorial material really got to me. A lot of the introductions to the poems feel like stuff out of a middle school textbook, and sometimes they’re just flat out incorrect. The loss of Sappho’s corpus is a lot more complex than ‘the Library of Alexandria’, for example, and the pelican as a Christian symbol predates Thomas Aquinas by centuries. For all that Akbar talks about wanting more varied selections than a bunch of metaphysical poets and 19th century Americans, I was also kind of disappointed that his metaphysical poet pulls were so basic. This comes down to curation again, but if you’re making such a big deal about counting Teresa of Avila as a spiritual poet (this is not as weird as you seem to think it is, sir), why not pair her work on divine fire with Richard Crashaw, who was devoted to her and wrote some of his strongest work about her? Skip the Herbert and make that your metaphysical deep cut. But, and this is me being mean, the level of attention to this kind of detail in the anthology’s curation makes me think that Akbar probably doesn’t even know who Crashaw is.

On the bright side, this anthology is probably going to send some people out looking for more from the poets at its heart, and that’s always good. I’m also, again, really pleased that Akbar isn’t just slapping in public domain translations for the premodern stuff and calling it a day the way other Penguin anthologies do, and I’m happy at the geographical and cultural diversity on display here. But, as an anthology of spiritual verse, speaking to human spiritual experience in a deep, coherent, and thoughtful way, this book fails utterly.

[Jackson Brunner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Akbar's prologue hits the nail on the head - "today I have no idea what I mean when I say God, and I say it a lot." This collection was so heterogenous it's difficult to give it a coherent rating. The way he relates certain poems to "divinity" seems like a stretch. I do, though, admire the inclusion of poets from diverse time periods and cultures.

Some quotes:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."-John Keats
"Without understanding I get it."- Octavio Paz
"...be courageous when reason fails you be courageous..." - Zbigniew Herbert
"This is the end. We leave the rest to you." - Nahuatl people

[Nicola Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

The voice of the editor is a major part of this volume, so you may be distracted by it if you were looking for a simple collection of religious poetry. But I enjoyed his thoughts on the quest for the spirit and his commentary on the poems - a mixture of history and personal connection.

The range of poems is across time, space and gender. and sometimes the spiritual aspect is not immediately apparent. But for me, that moment of connection to a distant unknown voice is the same as that glimpse of the light which may be divine.

[B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not usually one for sampler poetry collections, but each poem (for me, the early section the most) hits you in multiple ways but in different ways, poem after poem after poem. You will learn something about yourself reading this.

[Paul Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

BREATHTAKING GEOGRAPHICAL RANGE, with every continent represented, and the widest chronological range possible, starting with Enheduanna, “the earliest attributable author in all human literature,” who wrote in the 23rd century BCE, and ending with three still-living poets. The anthology works with a broad idea of “spiritual” as well, with poems reflecting mystical experience, of course, but also poems of doubt and despair. We get bewilderment as well as affirmation, poems of praise and poems of terror (Yeats’s “The Second Coming”), poems of our many kinds of relationship with the dead.

Akbar includes a good number of the greatest hits, so to speak, the poems you would immediately assume would be included in an anthology with this title: Rumi, Hafez, St. Francis of Assisi, Mirabai, St. John of the Cross, George Herbert. We also get a few curveballs—I didn’t expect to see Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, or Nâzim Hikmet here, but the poems Akbar chooses work beautifully in this context. And there is a wealth of poems by poets I had not even heard of: the Inuit poet Uvavnuk, Sarojini Naidu, Edith Södergran…this would be a long list, actually, so I will stop here.

The book makes a worthwhile read, but there are some eccentric decisions, great and small. For a small one: each poet gets a page with name, dates, place of origin, title of poem, and, when called for, translator. Those poets from a politically distinct nation-state are identified as coming from Ghana, Chile, Vietnam, and so on. But all the poets from the United States are said to be from “America.” This seems a little perverse.

Also eccentric:

Only one poem from each poet? It seems like one could make an exception for Rumi or Dickinson.

Including Rilke’s Second Duino Elegy in David Young’s very idiosyncratic translation. I had to go re-read Stephen Mitchell to clear my palate.

The selections from the big canonical names go for the famous bits rather than something that might be less familiar but better suited to the rest of the anthology. Why Canto III of Inferno, not “En la sua volontade é nostra pace”? Why a Homeric passage in which the gods comment on Odysseus’ situation and a very similar Virgilian passage of the gods commenting on Aeneas’, both of which seem mainly exposition, when we could have had the final choruses of Oedipus at Colonus or The Bacchae or Artemis's final speech in Hippolytus? Why Satan’s speech on top of Mt. Niphates rather than something from Samson Agonistes?

No T. S. Eliot? Worse, no H. D.?

Well, you can’t please everyone.

[cam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw Kaveh Akbar talk about divinity during a book event in Brooklyn. Having personally grown up without ever reading the Quran or really attending to any Islamic literature, I was interested in his use of hadiths in Martyr as poetic interventions to the narrative. During a Q&A, I asked how he seemed to have such an intimate relationship with the hadiths, at least enough to employ them for artistic purposes. He said that he just read a lot of divine poetry. I blinked at his simple response. In that moment, I recognized that being an artful pattern-identifier is as much about reading as it is about creating, and, since I was hungry for my own sense of spirituality to play with, I found his anthology of divine poetry.

In his introduction to the anthology, he writes about how as a child, the comfort of prayer was communicated more through the rhythm and sound of language than through meaning—Iranian Muslims, after all, pray in a language they do not understand. Through Akbar’s lyricism and intensity, I found his entire introduction to mimic the effect of prayer: it washed over me like the power of God’s language. I became entranced by the possibility of divinity in literature—its tone, sound, syncopation; its magic—to connect me to by heart and mind.

As a fiction writer, I hesitated at first through the anthology: I do not know how to read poems. Poetry, I learned, demands one to listen to their body as they read. As I progressed through the poems, I dog-eared the ones that moved me: poems that stirred an emotion, raised my hairs, or made me open my mouth in shock, in awe. Unlike with fiction, I couldn’t identify why my body reacted the way it did. All I knew was that I felt something, which seemed important. After reading this anthology, I thought about the important things I could summarize from it. I wanted to write about the power of the divine, and time, and spirit, and about the goodness in resisting the natural urge to describe the indescribable; and about God being emotion and vice versa, and as I spun myself into circles trying to think about why this experience felt so important, I paused for a moment. What I was trying to say is that, perhaps for the first time, I let myself surrender, and it humbled me.

[7jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.
A collection of spiritual poems from 110 poets, chosen by the editor as poems that he felt particularly close to, but honestly this doesn’t mean that it feels too personal, too like one person’s taste. Some of the poems are well-known, some a lot less; depends on the reader really (I have read the first example’s, Enheduanna’s, poems already elsewhere in a slim volume.

The depths of spirituality here are sometimes obvious, sometimes harder to see, but any reader can see that there is much variety, not just poems from Western, white, Christian (wo)men, and from a wide timeline, with various moods, images, themes, and history connections. The poems are given whole, or a snippet has been chosen from a longer work (some take more than one page).

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.
- Uvavnuk, 19th century

Each poem has the information of when-written, where, occasionally also translator(s) mentioned, and from what work. A short introduction follows, and the poem starts on next page.

Like always, some poems open easily, some need more time to think about. Some are nicely thought-provoking, like Frederick Douglass’ witty observations. Some read like songs, like the snippet from ”Sundiata”. And I think I finally understood at least partly one of Rilke’s poems, here *lol*

Wanderer’s Nightsong II
Over every mountain-top
Lies peace,
In every tree-top
You scarcely feel
A breath of wind;
The little birds are hushed in the wood.
Wait, soon you too
Will be at peace.
- Goethe

So, 3.5 stars mainly because this was clearly the editor’s selection, close to him, and reader might have chosen a little differently. But I appreciate the effort to bring more variety into this type of grouping, to make the reader see how much good variety of spiritual poems are out there, no matter what religion, belief, or doubt it is. Recommended.

[Farida Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book by its minimalist, yet magical cover,
In the introduction written by Akbar we learn about the author and the part played by poetry in his recovery from alcohol addiction. I particularly found the writer's own experience of growing up in Iran and arriving in the US as an immigrant set the town for the selection of poetry in this book.
He writes;
'Poets have always looked to the skies for inspiration, and have written as a way of getting closer to the power and beauty they sense in nature, in each other and in the cosmos.'
The book introduces the reader to 'spiritual verse' from poetry that transverses time and culture.
There is a wide selection to appreciate and one marvels at Akbar's depth of knowledge.
The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse is highly recommended.

[AM · Rating 2 out of 5]

The poems are great poems, but this book isn't what its title claims nor what its blurb says. I was looking for verse that was intended as spiritual from traditions around the world, and I was hoping for more older verse. Instead, this collection would more accurately be called "The Penguin Book of Poems that Hold Special Significance for Kaveh Akbar." It probably wouldn't sell well, but it would be much more accurate marketing. And Akbar admits it in the intro.

The editor skipped over a millennia of verse in Christianity and Judaism, for example, and then portrayed someone in the 1200s as an "early Christian mystic." Akbar then chose to shoehorn in a bunch of 19th and 20th century poems about other topics that, while great poems, weren't intended as spiritual verse. In fact, some of the poets would be offended by that designation.

[Natalia Traldi Bezerra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm unsure of what I expected from this book, thus having spotted it at my local bookshop but having borrowed it from the library. Whilst the poems selected certainly span the ages, perhaps for the author's nationalities and therefore, cultural background, there's a focus on Middle Eastern and American poets with a few peppered near them e.g. Native American, Hindu etc. Plus, the divine written about is, most often, within institutionalised religion.
I missed poems about spirituality within 'pagan' religions, or more from Native Peoples' etc. More of a geographical spread perhaps? Either way, it's worth a read for the words are beautiful nonetheless.

[houley · Rating 4 out of 5]

so oddly enough, i don't often read poetry collections, even though i have upwards of 5,000 poems saved. if every collection is like this, i might just leave novels behind. i came into this from a place of spiritual exile. i've never been religious, so in a way i wanted to mesmerize myself in a way with these spiritual poems. i probably understand spirituality even less than i did when i started reading this collection, but i sure as hell have been mesmerized. lending words from octavio paz's "homage to claudius ptolemy" that was featured in the collection, "the stars write. without understanding i get it: i'm writing too. and in this very instant someone is spelling me out."

[Misha Kahan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a collection with hundreds of poems some are bound to be good, and of course many are. All in all, it feels like the poems were picked a bit randomly from among the works the editor liked. To the spiritual person, everything can be spiritual; and yet it’s hard not to see how remarkably un-spiritual some of the selected works are. For eg., puzzling choices from Lucretius, Virgil and other classical authors, some overtly mundane political works, a poorly picked passage from the Bhagavad Gita instead of obvious gems from the Upanishads

[Emily K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry usually isn't my cup of tea, but this anthology has changed my perspective. I can't get certain lines out of my head. It doesn't matter what i'm doing, whether it's doing dishes or walking my dog, these poems are always on my mind. The words are so profound and insightful. The idea of reading words throughout the ages was very compelling to me, and i'm very thankful that I chose to pick up this book out of so many others.

[Hana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book and after reading it cover to cover, went back and dipped in and out, finding old favourites and new words that I found connection with. The diversity of this book is wonderful, showing that the Divine is not the property of any one religion, time or culture but permeates everything.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for gifting me this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a book of spiritual verse spanning time and different beliefs, there are bound to be poems that inspire deeply and others that make no mark. But this is a wonderful book that is full of surprises, inspiration and wisdom. Every time you open it you discover something of interest and often deep spiritual meaning.

Highly recommended.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-copy of the book.

[Meridian Taussig · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a bit disappointed in this book though was blown away by the first poem he included. The book was arranged chronological and the first entry was written by a Sumerian priestess in the 23rd Century BCE! And, it was lovely-she was writing to the "Lady of all powers...Radiant one...guardian of all greatness...." Akbar gave a short synopsis of each poet, the poem, and the date when it was written. His breadth of research was intense! I'm glad I was exposed to this work.

[James Carrigy · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10

As with many of these collections, I skip the extracts that I’ve read in Penguin Classics I’ve read or yet to read, and yet there’s quite a juicy amount of fine selections to pore over here, selected carefully by Akbar who manages the difficult job of being a compelling enough narrator whose personal love for said works makes for a fine compliment rather than distraction.

[Harry Allard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would've appreciated a bit more context in the little blurb for each poet, maybe a page. I guess that's not the point though, this serves more to introduce you to a range of poets from across all sorts of cultures and moments in history. It was great for a poetry idiot like me, I have loads to follow up on and explore.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would never think I'd be the reader for this book, but I so am. It is Kaveh Akbar's warm introductions and selections that make this book a blossoming flower. It walks me through time and longing and how divine all this is. So grateful for this book.

Thank you, Sylvia Ewing, for the recommendation!