Hummingbird Sleep: Poems, 2009-2011
ISBN: 9780820345758
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Georgia Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Language & Literature;

The poems in Hummingbird Sleep move associatively between Coleman Barks's personal experience and his extensive reading, weaving together a wild and eclectic range of material. A discussion of Plotinus, Barks's appearance on PBS NewsHour , a note Keats once left on Wordsworth's mantelpiece, a splinter in the heel, and a quote from the Upanishads-all make their way into Barks's most recent poems, which achieve intimacy and expansiveness at the same time.


Coleman Barks was born on April 23, 1937, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He graduated from the University of North Carolina and the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1972 he has taught English at the University of Georgia at Athens.

Barks received the New England/Breadloaf Quarterly Narrative Poem Prize and the Southern Poetry Review's Guy Owen Award. His collections of poetry include The Juice and Gourd Seed. Barks is perhaps better known as a translator of the poet Rumi, a thirteenth century Mystic. Rumi is cpnsidered the greatest mystic of the Sufi religion and wrote extensively in Farsi, the language of Iran.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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