Rumi - The Big Red Book

The Masterwork of America's Bestselling Poet. " Coleman Barks found Rumi floating in some Georgia lake and brought him back to life. What a blessing! Rumi says, 'Some nights stay up until dawn, as the moon sometimes does for the sun.' Coleman has stayed up all night, and every reader is grateful." - ROBERT BLY, National Book Award - winning poet and translator Considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, The Big Red Book is perhaps the greatest work of Rumi, the medieval Sufi mystic who also happens to be the bestselling poet in America. Rumi was born in 1207 to a long line of Islamic theologians and lawyers on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire in what is now Afghanistan. In order to escape the invading Mongol armies of Genghis Khan, his family moved west to a town now found in Turkey, where he eventually became the leader of a school of whirling dervishes. It was a fateful day in 1244 when he met Shams Tabriz, a wild mystic with rare gifts and insight. the renowned scholar Rumi had found a soul mate and friend who would become his spiritual mentor and literary name. "What I had thought of before as God" Rumi said "I met today in a human being." Out of their friendship, Rumi wrote thousands of lyric poems and short quatrains in honour of his friend Shams Tabriz. They are poems of divine epiphany, spiritual awakening, friendship, and love.