Coleman Barks

Rumi: The Big Red Book

The Great Masterpiece Celebrating Mystical Love and Friendship

Talking Points

Coleman Barks is a renowned poet and the bestselling author of The Essential Rumi, The Soul of Rumi, Rumi: The Book of Love, and The Drowned Book. He was prominently featured in both of Bill Moyers’s PBS television series on poetry, “The Language of Life” and “Fooling with Words.” He taught English and poetry at the University of Georgia for thirty years, and he now focuses on writing, readings, and performances.

Description

Rumi’s “Divani Shamsi Tabriz” (”The Works of Shams of Tabriz”—named in honor of Rumi’s spiritual teacher and friend) is a collection of lyric poems that contain more than 40,000 verses by America’s bestselling poet, and is a classic of Persian literature. This book represents over thirty-three years of Coleman Barks’s work on Rumi’s seminal classic.