Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

Rainer Maria Rilke

Translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Riverhead Books
1996

Finalist for the Pen/West Translation Award

"These poems of spiritual yearning and discovery composed by the young Rilke one hundred years ago feel very fresh and moving in the beautifully transparent, supple versions of Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. With their psalm-like directness and emotional urgency, they nourish and quicken the life of the spirit."

—Chana Bloch, translator of The Song of Songs

While visiting Russia in his twenties, Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, was moved by a spirituality he encountered there. Inspired, Rilke returned to Germany and put down on paper what he felt were spontaneously received prayers. Rilke's Book of Hours is the invigorating vision of spiritual practice for the secular world, and a work that seems remarkably prescient today, one hundred years after it was written.

Rilke's Book of Hours shares with the reader a new kind of intimacy with God, or the divine—a reciprocal relationship between the divine and the ordinary in which God needs us as much as we need God. Rilke influenced generations of writers with his Letters to a Young Poet, and now Rilke's Book of Hourstells us that our role in the world is to love it and thereby love God into being.

These fresh translations rendered by Joanna Macy, a mystic and spiritual teacher, and Anita Barrows, a skilled poet, capture Rilke's spirit as no one has done before.