One of those books that, after you finish, you keep close by so that you can, at certain moments, reach out and read one of the poems. Because there are moments when, if you are attentive and still enough to listen, you will feel a need for some kind of contact with beauty, a yearning of sorts for something very much like love, that you maybe lost or still hope for. The wonder of Hafez poetry is that it answers this universal longing even as it awakens it. There are poems where the love is clearly directed to God and others where the love is very human, for the fragile tulip, for another human being, for the real friend or the real lover or the lost child. But there are many poems where you just don't know. When I first read Hafez many, many years ago in my youth, I could see in Hafez' poems this distinction between divine and human love more clearly. Now the lines are blurred. It's all one. Or as Hafez says: "Where shall I go, when from thy presence Thou art everywhere?" The lines and distinctions between this is of God and this is not are blurred. Hafez blurs them for you, confuses the mental constructs and distinctions and returns you to the truth of the emotion. Who who has lived a while has not felt the truth of this: "For all eternity the perfume of love comes not to him who has not swept with his cheek the dust from the tavern threshold." Every time I read Hafez I understand a little more about the role of poetry, the function of all art, of literature, of the poet. We need to make time in our lives to feel what these poems make us feel and there needs to be people who can do this. It is a terrible loss if this doesn't happen.