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Loading... St. John of the Cross : The Poemsby Saint John of the Cross (otherwise under John of the Cross, Saint)
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A good introduction to this obscure Spanish poet and mystic. (  ) charlie68 | Jul 10, 2009 |  This is a superb translation of the poetry of St. John of the Cross. Ken Krabbenhoft has caught the beauty of the Spanish original. The poems grow upon you with rereading. One of the two poems that particularly captured my imagination was "I entered I knew not where", which continues "and remained without knowing,/ there transcending all knowledge". This is a paean to the intuitive way of knowing, which for St. John comes through the knowing of God but always remains a counter sense of not knowing. this is where your heart feels path but which your brain is unable to describe accutely. The other poem that I've read over a number of times is "Surely I know the spring that swiftly flows", which continues "even during the night". There is rhythm in this poetry, always anchored by the last line of each verse "even during the night" (Spanish "aunque es de noche") which pulls one into the depths of his soul, and the reader is drawn into his own depths, not revealed fully but now seen darkly. (  ) vpfluke | Jul 3, 2007 | St. John of the Cross was a supreme mystic, and his poems are perhaps less known than his mystical treatises, but this collection corrects that. Roy Campbell, a long-wrongly-forgotten poet himself proves his merits as a translator extraordinaire. (  ) tuckerresearch | Sep 21, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0226401103, Paperback)The Poems of St. John of the Cross, translated by Ken Krabbenhoft, burn with the ecstatic fury of the Psalms and sail in the radiant peace of the poet Rumi.St. John of the Cross was born in Spain in 1542 and was imprisoned in 1577 for his devotion to the teachings of St. Teresa of Avila. During his imprisonment, he wrote most of the poems that have earned him the reputation as the greatest poet of the Christian mystical tradition. The poems, presented here in a beautifully printed, lightly illustrated Spanish/English edition, often blur the line between romantic and religious love, in the tradition of Song of Songs. "On a Dark Night," for example, begins with a lover whose gender is not identified, stealing out of a house, down a secret ladder, following "my only light and guide / the light that burned in my heart," to find "the one I knew would come, / where surely no one would find us." The poem ends with a breathtaking image of spiritual and sensual contentment: "On the ramparts / while I sat ruffling his hair / the air struck my neck / with its gentle hand, / leaving my senses suspended. / I stayed; I surrendered, / resting my face on my Beloved. / Nothing mattered. / I left my cares / forgotten among the lilies." These are poems to read aloud to a lover, poems to read silently before God, poems that quiver before the world's beauty and thankfully seek to describe something beyond it--a God whose undeniable intimacy with humanity always edges toward the ineffable. --Michael Joseph Gross (retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 11:47:40 -0500) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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