The selections in this volume are terrific and the translations are lucid. The commentary is fairly restrained--much more could be written about any of the poems--and readers without much familiarity with Islam will probably miss many allusions. The appended "bio-bibliographies" of poets are succinct and helpful. The one genuinely bad thing about the book is the calligraphic font in which all the poems are set; it makes reading them more difficult and distracts from the beauty of the language and ideas.