New study spaces on Homewood campus
We have a full list of options for where to study during reading and exam days.
Learn more
Alert
Home > Giving > Adopt a Book > Poetry

Book Category: Poetry

The Liberation of a Chicano Mind Soul

Canto y Grito Mi Liberación established Ricardo Sánchez (1941-95) as one of the leading voices in the Chicano poetry movement. Sánchez spent most of the 1960s in prison where he earned his GED and began writing. He later went on to receive a doctorate, teaching creative writing and Chicano studies at Washington State University. Sánchez embraced Chicano cultural identity and challenged the assimilation of Chicano Americans.

Manuel Gregorio Acosta (1921-89) was a Mexican-born American painter, muralist, sculptor, and illustrator. His work received more recognition during the Chicano movement, and his portrait of Cesar Chavez was reproduced on the cover of Time magazine in 1969.

 

You Renew the Face of the Earth: Psalm 104

Barbara Wolff (b. 1949) is one of the rare contemporary artists using the techniques of medieval manuscript illumination. She paints on vellum—animal skin—and highlights her work with silver, gold, and platinum foils. Her work has been exhibited at The NY Illustrators Club, The Jewish Theological Seminary, Yeshiva University Museum, The Museum of Biblical Art, and the Morgan Library & Museum. Her exploration of the world of nature as it relates to Biblical texts has been enriched by her background and work as a renowned natural science illustrator.

The ten illuminations that comprise You Renew the Face of the Earth illustrate passages from Hebrew Psalm 104, a song in celebration of all creation. This great hymn to the divine in nature directs our awareness to the miracle of our world. The sentiments expressed in this psalm have a particular relevance to our own era, a time of growing consciousness of the profound effect of human enterprise on nature, and of questioning our role as stewards of our planet.

In a number of the paintings, Wolff has portrayed flora and fauna that the ancient Psalmist would certainly have known, and that may still be found in the land of Israel today. She has included the flowers and grasses of its fields and forests, birds which pass through the land each spring and fall, and sea creatures of the Mediterranean, from a precious Murex snail to the great whales.

“And the Mountains Rose” (vv. 5-8), from You Renew the Face of the Earth: Psalm 104, fol. 2.
“The Earth is Full of Thy Creatures” (v. 24), from You Renew the Face of the Earth: Psalm 104, fol. 7.
“Leviathan Whom Thou Hast Formed” (vv. 25-6), from You Renew the Face of the Earth: Psalm 104, fol. 8.

Crystal of the Rose typescript

Best known as a visual artist, I. Rice Pereira (1902-71) was an early American proponent of abstraction as it developed in Europe. Although she was never at the center of any of the American avant-garde movements of the 20th century, Pereira was quite influential and had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1953 that traveled around the country. In the 1950s and 1960s, Pereira published several books expounding her philosophy, many at her own expense.

Written throughout the 1950s, usually individually dated here in the typescript, with the preface dated May 29, 1959, this collection of poems was published in 1959 as The Crystal of the Rose by the Nordness Gallery, in an addition of 300 copies (99 with an original watercolor). It was dedicated to Pereira’s sister who had died in 1941.

 

A collection of poemsA collection of poemsA collection of poems

Collected Poems of Hafiz

This illuminated manuscript in hand-painted lacquer binding does not simply contain a collection, in a beautiful Arabic manuscript, of the verse of the celebrated fourteenth-century Persian poet Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī, known as Hafiz—it is also an incredible work of art. The poems of Hafiz, many of them ghazals celebrating earthly and divine love, were so well-regarded that many copies of his Divān were created over the centuries after his death.

This gorgeous copy from the nineteenth century comes from the library of the renowned British bookbinder Francis Bedford, and was probably rebound and decorated by him. The lacquer covers feature a lush arrangement of hand-painted pink and yellow flowers on the outside and bouquets of irises on the inside.

spine of book Diwan Hafiz