The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz

Barada and Hoover bring the work of a poet “consumed completely” to English readers in a satisfying collection that was inspired by the Bible’s Song of Songs and is full of figures given over to a love charged with a near-erotic and mystic constancy. In poems that remind the reader of John Donne’s fierce, unbridled devotion, mingled with John Keats’s romanticism, people “suffer, grieve, and die” at the various altars of love. “Love alone,” a wife in one poem says, “is my task.” That love is pitched toward the divine throughout. “This life,” de la Cruz writes of God, “is endless dying/ until I live with you.” The collection invites the acceptance of mystery ushered by the intoxicating work of devotion; as one poem attests: “Love does such work.” It allows a world where “not knowing is knowing.” While de la Cruz can verge on the sentimental, he does so to express an honest form of feeling. This is a satisfying book of extremes, where men “die because [they] don’t die” and risks are taken to capture complex feelings. (Apr.)