COLEMAN BARKS (1937-2026) was the best-selling translator of The Essential Rumi The Soul of Rumi, and Rumi: The Book of Love and author of numerous volumes of poetry including Hummingbird Sleep: Poems, 2009-2011 and Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008 (both Georgia). He taught creative writing and American poetry in the English Department at the University of Georgia for thirty years and lived in Athens, Georgia.

A mighty book. A rain dance between Plotinus and the grandeur of an Athens snowfall. Hummingbird Sleep is so good I have taken up residence in it. Barks is writing out where the buses don't park. This is his finest work yet: intimate, touched with grief, but with a great intensity of wonder. The whole affair carries a pirate's joy for life.