The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez

One of our most acclaimed poets brings the work of the great Persian mystic and poet, Hafez, to a new audience.

There is no poet in our tradition who carries the amount of admiration and devotion that the Persians have for Hafez. Children learn to sing Hafez poems in the third grade, and almost every family has a copy of the collected Hafez on the dining room table. Robert Bly and the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn have worked for 15 years on this book of Hafez, the first that carries into English his nimbleness, his outrageous humor, his defenses of the private life in the face of the fundamentalists, and the joy of his love poems. He writes in the ghazal form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry. This is Rumi’s wild younger brother, now brought into an English that makes his genius visible.

At last in English is a wide selection from the great Persian poet Hafez, so beloved in Iran that almost every family there keeps his Divan close at hand. When Robert Bly and Coleman Barks visited Iran, they heard schoolchildren singing Hafez poems at his graveside. For some fifteen years, the great Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn has worked with Robert Bly to produce this translation, which for the first time carries into English Hafez's nimbleness, his fierce humor directed at the mullahs, his astonishing range of thought, and the delight of his love poems. A master of the ghazal form, one of the greatest inventions in the history of poetry, Hafez may be considered as Rumi's wild younger brother, and is now translated into an English that helps us understand his true genius.

“Bly, like other giants of poetic activism . . . has not been content to merely live his times. He has actively challenged them, and his muse, far from abandoning him, has stood steadfastly . . . at his side.” - Minneapolis Star Tribune

“For more than fifty years Robert Bly has been exploring the poetry of other languages, cultures, ages, in order to reach past the inherited conventions of poetry in English which he grew up with in mid-century." - African Sun Times

"This is an amazingly meaningful translation of Hafiz’s poetry that I deeply appreciate. . . . Having understood the original text in both its technical and non-technical senses, they have presented us with a translation shorn of jargon." - —Baha al-Din Khurramshahi, author of Hafiznama, a two-volume Persian commentary on Hafez’s poetry, Tehran, Iran

"The medieval Persian mystical poet Hafez used sinuous lines and ringing metaphors to write about wisdom, the dangers of repression and the paradoxes of his faith. His blend of simplicity and challenge makes him the most popular poet in Iran today. Bly and Lewisohn (a world-class Sufism expert) present clear and memorable versions of Hafez’s renowned lyric meditations. . . . Though Hafez does not (yet) have the immense Western popularity of that other Sufi mystic, Rumi, his verse has all the ingredients to make a similar splash." - Publishers Weekly