I have always considered Rumi to be one of my favorite authors.
This was great. I have never read anything from Rumi that I did not enjoy.
He will remain one of my favorites as always!

I received an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.

I absolutely adore RUMI. I can go as far back as high school and coming across his Big Red Book collection, and was hooked that point on.

The book is well written, taking the reader on a beautiful journey.

RUMI will forever live, so long as Poetry exists.

Available everywhere Sept 10th, 2019

I was stoked for this because I adore Rumi. I haven't yet read The Essential Rumi, but I've read him widely. This fell short for me. I wish there had maybe been more context for some of the poems or better organization. The time in which Rumi lived was drastically different, and usually his poems read as universal, but the poems in this collection felt confusing without that context.

Amazing! All of the poems are so beautiful you will want to read them twice. I'm addicted to this book's beauty.

These poems by Rumi are incredible. They are in fact much more than poems, they are feelings. I enjoyed them very much.
I will not be writing a larger/more in depth review since I don't feel the need to nor do I find myself competent to do so.

Enjoyed reading this, although I’m not really into poetry, this one was definitely worth the time spent on it

Out of love for you, every strand of my hair turned into lines of poetry
~Rumi



Rumi: Unseen Poems translated by Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz is a modern and more accurate translation of the thirteenth-century Persian mystic. Many previous collections relied on old translations and translations that appealed more directly to the Western reader. This collection preserves the Islamic side of the poet. The moon plays a central role in the religion and the poetry of Rumi. There are poems where the moon is jealous of one's beauty, the splitting of the moon, and a rooftop observation signaling the beginning of Ramadan.

Didn't I tell you last night, "Your beautiful face is beyond compare."
The moon jealous of your beauty was torn in two

Wine, drinking, and drunkenness are repeated throughout the collection as a metaphor. Alcohol is to be avoided because of the way it influences people and their sensibility. Matching the strength of alcohol is love. Rumi compares the feeling of love to that of wine, something that lifts one well above the tediousness of the day. It is a powerful feeling.

My face is a hundred times brighter when I see your face.
My soul is a hundred times happier when your soul is near.

The direct translation of the original texts gives a definitive view of the poet. His other writing has been embraced, edited, and mistranslated to fit into the Western New Age movements.  Using unpublished poems, the translators attempt to preserve the real Rumi complete with his religious views.  The final result is simply fantastic poetry with an Islamic tone.  The poet, after all, was a life long scholar of Islam and the Koran. 

This collection will be printed in the small easy to carry around Everyman's Library Pocket Poet hardcover bindings that also look well on one's bookshelf. The Pocket Poets series runs nearly 120 different collections of poetry organized by poet or subject.



Available September 10, 2019

The leaving out of Islam seems a bit parochial to me although I always love reading Rumi. How can anyone seriously leave Islam out of Sufism? I have seen this tried before.

I was given a digital arc of this book by Netgalley.
I really enjoyed reading this book, some of the poems were very raw and left a strong impression, others not so much, but it always happens in poetry collections. I think the translators did a good job making Rumi's poetry available to others, and I'm thankfull to them for letting me read a copy of the work they did.

To read Rumi is always a pleasure, this new collection of poems is just fantastic. The translation is beautiful, excellent work. Highly recommended not only to those who enjoy poetry but to everyone who loves a peaceful reading. To read this book was truly an honor.

Thank you, NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. #NetGalley #Rumi

I have always loved to read Rumi and this collection of newly translated works was fantastic! Readers should not skip the forward in this book as it explains how this book came to be along with other information. I will be going back and reading this little gem to savor the words once more.

It is always a great time when you have new Rumi poems! I have been interested in his poetry for a while now- I gravitate to his love poem as they are sublime. I am still working through this book as the content is dense and I like to put my introspective hat on when reading prose from bygone philosophers.

I would recommend this to lovers for Rumi and people who enjoy poetry.

I love Rumi's work- madness, life, love, faith, wine, passion, relationships...he covers it all! These poems were new and beautifully translated. I loved the forward that describes how this book came to be. Deeply felt and very inspiring.

I did review online at Goodreads, but the form won't let me add the link.

Rumi: Unseen Poems
by Rumi
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Everyman's Library
Poetry, Religion & Spirituality
Rumi, a Sufi poet from the thirteenth century, was made popular in the US by poets Coleman Barks and Robert Bly. Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz claim to have gotten closer to Rumi's intent while maintaining the spirit of the originals. Gooch and Mortaz collect, as the title suggests, poems that had yet to be translated, or ones that hadn't quite hit their mark.



Both Barks and Bly would play instruments and slowly read the poems. It is nice to divorce the words from the extra sounds and just revel in their cadence.



Without music, some poems attain a rhythm close to what Rumi states: "Physician, recite a magic spell":



Once again you are unkind. Remember....
Saying we'd be joined until the Resurrection.
Now you're joined with cruelty alone. Remember.
You whispered in my enemy's ear.
You saw me and you hid. Remember.
or perhaps my favorite, Blakean poem:

What better cure than madness?
Pull up a hundred anchors with madness!
Sometimes the intellect gives rise to apostasy.
Have you ever seen doubt caused by madness?
When your pain grows fat, go mad.
Your pain will grow thin from madness.
In the tavern where the mad ones go,
Quickly grab a cup of madness....
To find your love,
I opened a hundred doors of madness.

Elsewhere he speaks against madness. Like Whitman, he accepts contradictions. Likewise, he speaks against wordplay, but we entire into contrariness and wordplay in this lovely passage:



Whether I call it a pen or I call it a pennant
It is both aware and unaware, such unaware awareness!
The mind cannot fully explain such contraries,
A kind of artful artlessness, a marvelous form freely formed.


Some poems have rhythms or repetitions that do not feel natural in English (translations make it difficult to lay blame although certain liberties may have been needed):



Where is the grace I saw in your face all night?
Such a sweet story I heard from you, all night.
Although your flame burned the moth of my heart,
I circled the flame of your beautiful face, all night.
Before your beautiful moonlike face, night veiled itself.
I ripped apart the veil of night, all night.
My soul, full of joy, licked itself like a cat.
Like a baby, I sucked my thumb, all night.


and

Today the line between a stranger and me,
I do not know.
So drunk that the road to my own house,
I do not know.
Beautiful passages do dot the book:

O heart, since the royal falcon hunted you,
You are able to translate the secret language of birds. Such translations!
and

where did that tall, shapely cypress tree go?
He spread his light among us like a candle....
Go to the garden and ask the gardener...
Go to the rooftop and ask the watchman--
That unique sultan, where did he go?
Some passages we may need more context in terms of 13th century Persian language and in terms of the Quran:

I blush when I call love human.
I fear God too much to say that God is love.
This seems a rebuke of Judeo-Christian notions, which is fine, but what does he propose instead? Is it implicitly understood? Or is it the leaping, dancing and fire? Those, though, seem more of an aspect of the believer than of God, unless by doing them the believer becomes God. It's hard to tell without context.



The other problem is that much of the text is addressed to a lover, which I understood to be both literal and God, but maybe it is just the lover, or maybe just God. If the lover is God, then in what ways is God love or not love? How are we to know without more context? I am asking for a generous introduction, setting the stage for our reading.



I cast my net wider to find my own net wider and read on Wikipedia, "Rumi spent the next twelve years of his life in Anatolia dictating the six volumes of this masterwork, the Masnavi." This only raises more questions. Are these poems pieces of one larger work? Or just dissociated poems? If the latter, are we to read meaning into them or read meaning out of them?



So I spread my net wider. Gooch, one of this volume's editors, apparently was more forthcoming with the BBC:

says Gooch[,] “[Rumi and a wandering mystic known as Shams of Tabriz] have this electric friendship for three years – lover and beloved [or] disciple and sheikh, it’s never clear...." Shams disappeared. "[Rumi's] work comes out of dealing with the separation from Shams and from love and the source of creation, and out of facing death.... a line from Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there.”
In the same article, Anne Waldman addresses the implied question that Gooch raises, calling the verse “homoerotic... consummated or not." Maybe. But could it be a vibrant Platonic love--something our culture cannot fathom because we have bound or limited all "love" to just one: the sexual kind?



"Rumi's poems articulate what it feels like to be alive," says Lee Briccetti.... “And they help us understand our own search for love and the ecstatic in the coil of daily life.”



Mojaddedi relates for the BBC Rumi’s four innovations:

his direct address to readers in the rare second person
his urge to teach [‘inspirational’ literature]
his use of everyday imagery
his optimism of the attainment of union within his lyrical love ghazals. The convention in that form is to stress its unattainability and the cruel rebuffs of the beloved. Rumi celebrates union.
This all helps although it doesn't seem true that the "you" is the reader. Perhaps the lover, or an aspect of one's self (e.g. the heart as seen above), or even God. Or are all these conflated: reader, lover, self, God?

It's great to know how Americans read it, what they find appealing. But how do Muslims read it within their tradition?

Again Wikipedia goes on to say that Rumi speaks on his own work:
I am the servant of the Qur'an as long as I have life.
I am the dust on the path of Muhammad, the Chosen one.
If anyone quotes anything except this from my sayings,
I am quit of him and outraged by these words.
[T]he book of the Masnavi... is the Explainer of the Qur'ân.
Do any of our Western readings chaff the Quran? Would Rumi be outraged? Do Muslims accept or reject the way Westerners read Rumi? Do they have something in between or have a different interpretation entirely? One Muslim acquaintance called Rumi's work religious, and we Westerners tend to remove the verses from this context. Why do we do that, and what is the religious context?

The title of the collection is curious as well. This isn't the normal way we'd call such poems. We might call them [previously] "uncollected or "new translations," not "unseen." Does that suggest that we haven't yet seen Rumi and here he is now? Or are these poems that ask us to un-see? Why do they suppose these verses had yet to be collected? Why are they choosing these verses for this volume? What does it add or reshape what we know about Rumi and his vision?

As you can see, the volume raises questions that a good introduction needs to set straight, given that these poems have traveled so far in time, distance and language. But we do get moving selections, selections to inspire us, selections that sway with grace.


This volume will appear on September 10, 2019.

Rumi is awesome. Ok, ok it's a way overused epithet, but Rumi is the true exemplar of of the old-fashioned OED definition of awesome, "inspiring reverential awe". He's also audacious, naughty, radical, free-as-a-bird, passionate and love-struck, both about this world and the next. He loves people as much as he loves God, and vice versa. Brad Gooch and Marayam Mortaz have properly honoured Rumi's indomitable spirit in this volume, presenting many previously unseen works in vibrant and fresh language. The foreword is quite fascinating and helps us appreciate just how prolific and quirky Rumi was. Here you will find all the depth you expect from a great author, but you will do it in an almost delirious sense of fun.

Oh sweet joy! I have been a fan of Rumi for many years and I’m delighted to discover over 150 new poems that have never been seen before. As with all his work, I must take my time and read this slowly so I am only about a third of the way through as I am writing this review. I will take my time and savor each one as I hope you will too. Theses poems speak straight across the centuries to my heart.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Beatific, lovely, soothing...always as moving and fresh as my first experience with Rumi. The poetry of this influential author of long ago is a must to build the beauty of the human psyche.

Rumi (1207-1273) was trained in Sufism--a mystic tradition within Islam--and founded the Sufi order known to us as the Whirling Dervishes, who use dance and music as part of their spiritual devotion. Rumi's poetry has long been popular with contemporary Western audiences because of the way it combines the sacred and the sensual, describing divine love in rapturously human terms.

However, a number of Rumi's English translators over the past century were not speakers of Persian and they based their sometimes very free interpretations on earlier translations. With Western audiences in mind, translators also tended to tone down or leave out elements of Persian culture and of Islam in Rumi's work, and hundreds of the prolific poet's works were never made available to English speakers at all. In this new translation -- composed almost entirely of untranslated gems from Rumi's vast oeuvre -- Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz aim to achieve greater fidelity to the originals while still allowing Rumi's lyric exuberance to shine.

I LOVE RUMI!! To read and enjoy this book was such a great honor. New poems from Rumi is an excellent love. I will indeed share the book and shout to everyone "GET THIS!!"
Thank you to the Publisher, as well as NetGalley for the advance copy.

I enjoyed the book and really liked it. New poems from Rumi is always a treat Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the arc.

Rumi is a fantastic translation of Rumi's works. Easy to understand and we'll written. I enjoyed this book.