The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine
Edited by KAVEH AKBAR
(PENGUIN CLASSICS, 400 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Kaveh Akbar, a Muslim American, grew up praying in Arabic, a language he didn’t otherwise speak. The music and mystery of a language used explicitly for communicating with the deity resonated deeply. When, years later, he was in recovery from alcoholism, it was poetry rather than religion to which he turned. “I could read a book of poems and for an hour, two hours, I didn’t have to worry about accidentally killing myself,” he explains in a foreword.

His selection of “110 Poets on the Divine” is the result. Dante is here, and Milton, Donne and Herbert; there’s Gerard Manley Hopkins and Sts Francis and John of the Cross, the mystical Rilke and the Dissenter William Blake, but also Rumi, Basho, Hafez, Li Po, and ­perspectives from Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and creeds that have ­vanished from the earth.