As Muslims who pray the five obligatory prayers each day of our lives, when able we orient ourselves toward Mecca, located in what is now Saudi Arabia, from wherever we happen to find ourselves, farflung in some island fastness, or out in desert dunes, or in a New York hotel room. There are boat people who tie up and face Mecca right in their boats, saintly Moroccan merchants who fling their carpets down just behind the counter where they sell embroidery thread to very particular customers (I am a witness). We can't get too "far out" when we stop to face Mecca five times and more a day, or in the solitude of our nights, knowing the plumb line goes straight through to the next world, and its rising to the holy heights.

This was the Pulitzer Prize-winner's first new collection of poetry after a gap of nearly ten years. "I was to be a Watchful Eye; a Tuned Ear; a Super-reporter," Brooks said. "I began writing about whatever I thought I knew, whatever I experienced." What she knew and experienced in those years resulted in poetry charged with a new power and urgency. The book takes its title from a long narrative poem set in a huge decayed apartment house in Chicago's black ghetto, a building called the Mecca. A tragedy in the Mecca gives rise to Brooks' extraordinary poetic evocation of its dense personal miseries and sense of life. Nine shorter poems follow, and these too, in large part, have their source in contemporary figures and circumstances: Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, "the Blackstone Rangers gang," the astonishing prideful mural painted on a ghetto wall one summer. The universality that transcends the immediate event, and is the mark of poetic sensibility, distinguishes all the poetry here. Gwendolyn Brooks' stature as a poet who "induces almost unbearable excitement"--As Phyllis McGinley described her--is here enriched by the new dimensions her work encompasses.--Adapted from book jacket.

This collection provides an introduction to the work of an American Arabist and Sufi poet. Ranging from the personal and lyrical to full narratives and the ever-present mystical elements, the poems explore the inter-cultural, traditional and postmodern world.

An anthology that offers a sampling of the best poetry written by Michigan writers.

The sound of geese over the house and in the house the prayer on the Prophet The sound of geese over the house and in the house Allah loves you The mountains are full of light and their gigantic shadows are eloquent since they're leaning against the sky and out into space with their crags and outcrops No sound can scale in a dimension commensurate with the pure expanse of it The sound of geese over the house puts a dome of life above us and a sea of life below us and a world of life all around us and a shaft of living Light inside us

LOVE IS A LETTER BURNING IN A HIGH WIND is a chronicle in sequential open field poems of a second visit to Turkey (the first recorded in formal ghazals), and to the glorious atmospheres of Sufi Master Mevlana Rumi and his gnostic teacher, Shams. Included are three extended narrative poems in the thematic style of Rumi's Masnawi, undertaken with no plot or source other than spontaneous inspiration. characterized by talking animals and "decapitated" watermelons. Ecstatic lyricism and sweet apprehension the impulse and goal to glorify and praise this swift life and its Originator and Sustainer: Sometimes I get tired of all this talk about God/ and I just want to go and sit under a tree// but then the tree starts talking to me about God/ and we find ourselves in another conversation