From the Publisher: 2007 is the "Year of Rumi," and who better than Coleman Barks, Rumi's unlikely, supremely passionate ambassador, to mark the milestone of this great poet's 800th birthday? Barks, who was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in Persian language and literature by the University of Tehran for his thirty years of translating Rumi, has collected and translated ninety new poems, most of them never published before in any form. The...

"Rumi's "Divani Shamsi Tabriz" ("The Works of Shams of Tabriz"--Named in honor of Rumi's spiritual teacher and friend) is a collection of lyric poems that contain more than 40,000 verses by America's bestselling poet, and is a classic of Persian literature. Its most familiar form is as a big red book, hence the name. Coleman Barks is famous for his renderings of Rumi's poetry and his work on these particular poems has never been published anywhere....