Author Description

Edited and translated by the internationally renowned poet John Kinsella and the Iranian-born poet and translator Ali Alizadeh, Six Vowels and Twenty-three Consonants is a groundbreaking new collection of poems presenting the wealth of poetic voices from one of the world's most important literary cultures. The book covers poetry from the early Middle Ages to the Modernists and Postmodernists of the 20th and 21st centuries. No other culture in the world has produced such quantity and quality of mystical poetry and true spiritual vision as the Persian tradition. In this poetry there is an effulgence of meaning; nearly every word resonates with chords of allusion and multiple signification. Whether we read a modern poet or one of the classics, this resonance reaches back to the beginnings of the tradition, and it touches us today.