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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I have a guest who has been on once before, but he is someone I look forward to seeing and talking

to. He is a poet and translator named Peter Cole. His new book is a new and selected

poems and translations called Hymns and Quams.

The beautiful thing is that the translations span centuries.

He translates Hebrew poetry, Arabic poetry, Palestinian poetry. He has a sensibility that has allowed the poems that he

translates to wash over into his own poetry so that his poems, at least his new ones, have a musical quality that is like

song and prayer and psalm mixed together. They might be translations, and they are translations

of his interior state. This interior state has been

modified by the fact that over the years, he's needed painful hip operations, sometimes repeatedly.

And that has formed part of his interstate.

And in fact, he wrote a poem about that.

Now, it's a certain kind of poem.

It's a gazal.

What's a gazole, Peter? So a gazal is a form that's become very popular in English, but it derives from Persian poetry.

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