JUST PUBLISHED
& available wherever books are sold!
To order this book from goodreads.com, click here,
or from amazon.com, click here.
"I love beginnings, despite the fear and uncertainty they bring. When I have won for myself a joy or reward, or when I wish that something had not happened, when I want to deny an experience the right to remain in my past--in such moments, I begin. And what do I do? I simply begin. I've already begun a thousand lives like this. I feel as though a whole generation must come to fulfill all these lives so that they won't remain unfinished."
Rainer Maria Rilke, cited in "To Be a Beginner" from You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke
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*** A MIDCOAST MAINE EVENT: "'DESIRE THE CHANGE': EXPLORING RILKE'S SONNETS TO ORPHEUS": a four-week evening course (Jan. 9 - 30, 2025 at the Camden Hills High School), 6 - 8 pm. Explore this poetic masterpiece, a cycle of fifty-five poems, which Rilke wrote as if to Orpheus, the god-like figure of ancient legends whose song enchanted the creatures. Here, he faces the inevitability of loss and grief, seeking to find a way to praise in the midst of it all as he traces how we might live abundantly in a disordered world. These Sonnets invite us to turn from the hurried world of “acting without vision,” reminding us how we might inhabit our own lives with greater spaciousness and hope. This course will focus primarily on these poems, drawing on my newly published version of this celebrated collection. It is meant for those who “desire the change,” as Rilke put it in one of these poems. Open to all—beginners and seasoned readers of Rilke—regardless of familiarity with the poet’s work. For information and to register, click here.
*** GOD BEYOND GOD: MEISTER ECKHART'S RADICAL VISION OF FREEING FAITH. An online ZOOM course on Tuesdays, Feb. 4 - 25, 2025, 7 - 9 pm (EDT)
This is a weekly Zoom course intended for those who want to risk going beyond the faith of settled “doctrine,” guided by the writings of a medieval mystic who reminds us that our journey into the mystery of God and self ultimately brings us not to language but to silence. If you find this concept intriguing, even alluring, this course might be the right one for you. For more information and to register, click here.
*** EVERYTHING MATTERS: EXPLORING THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION WITH RAINER MARIA RILKE: a poetry craft-talk on Thursday, March 20, 2025 (2 - 3:30 pm EDT)
Explore the imaginative world that lives in Rilke’s poems and how this might enliven us in our lives--and writing. We will consider what Rilke meant when he insisted that “poems are not feelings, but experiences,” and what it means to encounter poems with that in mind. Rilke also insisted that everything, to the minutest of things, was alive as part of what he called “the Whole,” and thus that everything mattered. His poems encourage us to widen the lens of our perception to the point that we begin to see that—and how—“everything matters” in our lives and in the world we inhabit together. For more information and to register, click here.
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UPCOMING RETREATS IN 2025
*** "LIVING THE QUESTIONS AND DARING THE PRESENT WITH RAINER MARIA RILKE" An onsite retreat at the Bonnevaux Retreat Centre, near Poitiers, France - 29 April - 4 May, 2025.
Rilke belongs to the handful of poets whose writings have had a shaping influence on the cultures of Modernity, and this year marks the 150th anniversary of his birth (1875 – 1926). Many will remember the epiphanies they experienced when they read his Letters to a Young Poet in which he famously advised us not to seek answers but rather dare to “live the questions.” His poems—from his early Book of Hours (1905) to his last two collections, The Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies (1923)—do just this: they invite us to live into what he described as “the Open.” To embrace the mysteries that are always close at hand. To accept the “here-ness” and “once-ness” of this life as an invitation. And to discover how we belong to what he came to call “the Whole.” For more information and to register, click here.
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* TO LISTEN TO MY RECENT CONVERSATION about my new books, The Wandering Radiance: Selected Poems of Hilde Domin and Meister Eckhart's Book of Darkness and Light, WITH LISA DELAY ("SPARK MY MUSE" PODCAST), click here.
* * TO LISTEN TO THE RECENT "POETS CORNER" CONVERSATION (April 2, 2023) ON The Wandering Radiance, with Marion Tauschwitz, Christopher Nelson, and Hilary Davies, click here.
*** TO LISTEN TO THE RECENT PODCAST ("OUT OF THE FOG" WITH KAREN HAGER) FEATURING JON SWEENEY AND ME ON OUR NEW ECKHART BOOK, click here.
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Recently published
J. B. Leishman, who published the first translation of this collection in 1936, wrote that "I feel, in reading [these sonnets], that we have come round the spiral to another 'dawn of consciousness,' where language is in the making, and where myth and symbol must often supply the place of not yet thinkable thoughts. No other writer is so full of the future; no other gives us such thrilling intimations of that inheritance on whose threshold we are standing, and which our civilization may be about to enter, if it does not perish through its own destructive forces."
To order from goodreads.com, click here, or from amazon.com, click here.
To hear Mark's interview on the impossible, joyful journey of translating Rilke the "Emerging Form" podcast, with Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and Christie Asch, click here.
To preorder this forthcoming book, click here.
NOW AVAILABLE:
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Just cited as the "Gold Winner" of the Nautilus Book Awards for 2024!
Published on March 1, 2023: the third of our Eckhart books, re-voicing the startling wisdom of Meister Eckhart in short, meditative poems. To preorder, click here.
What readers are saying about it:
"Sweeney and Burrows, in poems that are as elegant as they are scholarly, revoice Meister Eckhart’s grounding and expansive instructions to 'seek the light that shines / out of the darkness.'" —Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet and host of Poetry Unbound, from On Being Studios
"Meister Eckhart is one of the greatest of Christian mystics, but because of his depth he can be challenging to read. Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows unlock the poetry in his words to allow his light to shine. What Coleman Barks has done for Rumi, they have done for Eckhart—making his insight accessible and his wisdom sing.” —Carl McColman, author of The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism and Eternal Heart
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Just published (April, 2023):
"Burrows has succeeded in carrying the radiant power of Domin's poems over to the shoreline of his native tongue. This is an enrichment for all who long to be stirred by the courage and resilience she embodied as a Jewish writer who said of herself, upon returning to Germany following decades in exile: 'I stepped out into the air, and it carried me.'" --Vera-Sabine Winkler, author of Leise Bekenntnisse. Die Bedeutung der Poesie für die Sprache der Liturgie am Beispiel von Hilde Domin
"These shimmering poems by Hilde Domin lodge in the heart and blaze in the mind as they trace the journey of a deep soul through exile and self-realization. I would recommend these vivid poems to anyone who ares about the transformative power of great poetry." --Jay Parini, poet, biographer, screen-writer, and author of Why Poetry Matters
This new translation marks the first full collection of Hilde Domin's poems in English; to order this volume directly from Green Linden Press, click here. For a short endorsement by CAConrad, click here.
A SAMPLE OF RECENT BOOKS
Mark S. Burrows, The Chance of Home. Poems (2018); to order, click here (Paraclete) or here (amazon.com).
Meister Eckhart's Book of Secrets, with Jon M. Sweeney (2019); to order, click here.
Meister Eckhart's Book of the Heart, with Jon M. Sweeney; poems revoicing the wisdom of Meister Eckhart; to order, click here.
Also available: revised paperback edition of Rainer Maria Rilke, Prayers of a Young Poet (Paraclete Press, 2016). Heralded by Bill Moyers as "a powerful alchemy of the heart." To order, click here.
SAID, 99 Psalms, translated by Mark S. Burrows (Paraclete Press, 2013); to order, click here.
The Paraclete Poetry Anthology. Selected and New Poems, 2015 - 2016, edited by Mark S. Burrows (2016). To oder, click here.