Perfect Harmony (Calligrapher's Notebooks)

64 pp. In each of these poems, taken from his long work The Interpreter of Desire, the Sufi master Ibn 'Arabi (1165–1240) evokes the transcendent experience of spiritual love—provoked by his encounter with a young Persian woman named Nizham, "harmony." Nizham becomes the emblem of the perfect expression of love, of beauty, of divinity. He discovers her and loves her in desert sand dunes, in the beneficent shades of rare groves, in the cool wind, in the dazzling sun—in all the movements of nature.