The Book of Hours
a new poetic translation for devotional use

This collection of poems was beautifully written and incredibly powerful. In the first section “The Book of Monastic Life,” I loved Rilke’s stunning use of imagery and metaphor. Many of them featured trees, branches, roots, a great leaf, wind, etc… As a nature lover, I adore when writers and poets us......more

Read this book several years ago and decided that I had to own it, mainly for this poem: I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I've been circling for thousands of years......more

The task of a translator, I think, has always been unappreciated. It is a demanding one, a task that can never be done to the perfection it begs. Language is a living, breathing thing, and it holds within it an entire culture, and in that culture, an entire people, and within these people, an entire......more

"What will you do God, when I am gone?" Such is the question that sums up what Rilke addresses throughout this collection. Appropriately subtitled love poems to God, Rilke's Book of Hours is essentially a collection of poems devoting himself to God. Yet it is much more than simply that. The book is di......more

While reading this, I had a similar sensation as to when I hear Chopin's Nocturnes: this feeling of wanting to go on a personal, semi-secret path that's only unraveled when dreaming; a path which explores both my biggest fears, and deepest desires. Rilke's writing is so human, and yet so transcending......more