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Coleman Barks

Coleman Barks’s Followers (244)

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Coleman Barks


Born
in Chattanooga, TN, The United States
April 23, 1937

Website

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Coleman Barks is an American poet. Despite the fact that he admittedly speaks no Persian, he is world-renowned as a translator of Rumi and other mystic poets of Persia. Barks taught literature at the University of Georgia for three decades. He makes frequent international appearances and is well-known throughout the Middle East. Barks's work has contributed to an extremely strong following of Rumi in the English-speaking world. Due to his work, the ideas of Sufism have crossed many cultural boundaries over the past few decades. Coleman Barks received an honorary doctorate from Tehran University in 2006.

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The Hand of Poetry: Five My...

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Rumi: We Are Three

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I Want Burning: The Ecstati...

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Winter Sky: New and Selecte...

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 27 ratings — published 2008 — 4 editions
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Gourd Seed: Poems

4.25 avg rating — 24 ratings — published 1993 — 3 editions
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Hummingbird Sleep: Poems, 2...

4.15 avg rating — 13 ratings — published 2013 — 3 editions
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Tentmaking: Poems and Prose...

4.17 avg rating — 12 ratings — published 2001
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Rumi: Poet of Divine Ecstasy

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 5 ratings2 editions
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More books by Coleman Barks…
Quotes by Coleman Barks  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make sense any more.”
Coleman Barks

“A man once asked Rumi, "Why is it you talk so much about silence?" His answer: "The radiant one inside me has never said a word.”
Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

“Solitude is a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.”
Coleman Barks, The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

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