John of the Cross - Böcker

The profound, hugely influential exploration of spiritual growth and transformation, from one of the great Spanish mystics and poets ‘Oh living flame of love,how tenderly you scorch me’The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross, has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T. S. Eliot. This new edition of his essential works, in a sensitive and luminous translation by Martha Sprackland, gathers John of the Cross’s complete poems and a selection of his prose, including from his extended commentary on the poem ‘Dark Night’. In his immediate, sensual writing, we see a soul searching for meaning and union with the divine: both meek and bold, deserving and undeserving, oscillating between light and dark, soaring and falling, desperation and salvation. Dark Night gives us a picture of faith at once confronting and inspiriting, and of the power of words as a means of spiritual transcendence.Translated by Martha Sprackland, with an Introduction by Colin Thompson

St John of the Cross was a Carmelite friar and mystic who lived in Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century. He helped Teresa of Avila with her reform of the Carmelite Order and was imprisoned for political reasons. He wrote this beautiful poem on the love between the soul and God while in prison in Toledo.The work consists of the poem and a prose commentary on it. St John of the Cross was a Carmelite friar and mystic who lived in Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century. He helped Teresa of Avila with her reform of the Carmelite Order and was imprisoned for political reasons.He wrote this beautiful poem on the love between the soul and God while in prison in Toledo. The work consists of the poem and a prose commentary on it. 'Justly celebrated as a milestone in Spanish literature as well as a spiritual classic.' (Baroness Cox, from the Introduction).