Book Description
"Everything [Barnstone] writes..is a breathtaking achievement." --Carolyn Kizer "[Barnstone illuminates the spirt for us and he clarifies the unclarifiable...I think he does it by beating his wings." --Gerald Stern"
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"I could not hope to touch the sky/with my two arms." [Sappho] To Touch the Sky contains Willis Barstone's translations of some of the most inspiring writing of world literature: ten mystical and spiritual poets spanning three thousand years. It includes poems from The Song of Songs, Sappho, Herakleitos, Wang Wei, Mirabai, Rilke, and more. As Barnstone writes in his introduction, "There is a moment of vision, otherness, apparent timelessness, erotic sublimity, where the ordinary becomes extaordinary, for which there is no easy verbal equivalent except in the metaphors of poetry."
