Sonnets to Orpheus

After a decade of university teaching in Germany, and four decades as scholar and teacher in the US and Europe, the focus of Mark S. Burrows’ work explores the intersection of spirituality and the arts, mysticism and poetics. He travels widely throughout the US, Europe, and the UK, lecturing and offering retreats and workshops.
As a poet, he writes with what Jay Parini recently described as “a profound awareness of nature and its spiritual resonances.” His recent collection, The Chance of Home: Poems, appeared in 2018. A winner of the Wytter Bynner Prize in Poetry and numerous nominations for a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in more than 30 journals in the US, Europe, Australia, and India. He also edits poetry for the academic journal Spiritus and for the professional journal ARTS.
As a translator of German writings into English, his long interest in Rainer Maria Rilke led to the publication, in 2012, of the first version of Book of Hours, a collection Rilke first named simply Die Gebete, or The Prayers; Burrows published this collection, which includes many of Rilke’s best-known poems, in its first English translation as Prayers of a Young Poet (2013).
Burrows’ coauthored books of Meister Eckhart poems with Jon M. Sweeney have sold well since first appearing in 2017. The most recent of these is Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light (March 2023).

Introduction: “We Make the World Our Own”
The Sonnets to Orpheus
Part I
Part II

An excerpt from Rilke’s Letter on the Sonnets to Witold von Hulewicz The Ninth Duino Elegy
Acknowledgments