An indispensable resource for students and scholars, The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms features a diverse array of essays that treat the Psalms from a variety of perspectives. Classical scholarship and approaches as well as contextual interpretations and practices are well represented. The coverage is uniquely wide ranging.

“The vividness and beauty of the language emerge in a fresh way . . . with evocative simplicity.” —Robert Alter, professor emeritus of Hebrew and comparative literature, University of California, Berkeley The world’s greatest poetry resides in the Bible, yet these major poets are traditionally rendered into prose. In this pioneering volume of biblical poets translated in English, Willis Barnstone restores the lyricism and power of the poets’ voices in both the New and Old Testaments. In the Hebrew Bible we hear Solomon rhapsodize in Song of Songs, David chant in Psalms, God and Job debate in grand rhetoric, and prophet poet Isaiah plead for peace. Jesus speaks in wisdom verse in the Gospel, Paul is a philosopher of love, and John of Patmos roars majestically in Revelation, the Bible’s epic poem. This groundbreaking volume includes every major biblical poem from Genesis and Adam and Eve in the Garden to the last pages of Alpha and Omega in Paradise.

Reverential, celebratory, antagonistic, and even erotic, this remarkable collection of essays interprets the Psalms as a collection of poetry. Written by 14 acclaimed poets, the essays approach the Psalms from a personal, often autobiographical perspective, demonstrating how relevant they remain for today’s readers. Alicia Ostriker examines the Psalms’ glory and their terror in a moving essay that revels in their moods of joy while acknowledging the brutality they invoke, linking their violence to events such as 9/11, the Palestinian uprisings, and the Rwandan massacres. Weaving autobiographical anecdotes with scholarly introspection, Enid Dame provides a Jewish explanation of Psalm 22, while editor Lynn Domina contemplates the pastoral life as she connects the everyday with phrases from the Psalms. From a former nun to a self-described left-wing Jew, from a Midrashic scholar to a Texas rancher, the contributors mirror the wide swath of humanity interested in, and affected by, the Psalms.

Uniting the lyrical songs of Israel with their literary legacy, this book comprises renditions of the Psalms by 25 renowned poets from the 16th to the 20th century.

The story of how each age understood the nature biblical poetry, Kugel concludes, is a key to understanding the Bible's place in the history of Western thought.

A fresh, provocative look at the link between poetry and Christianity, both as it relates to the Bible itself as well as to Christian and religious life, by an accomplished scholar. The Bible is full of poems. In the Old Testament, there are the Psalms and the Song of Songs, the great exhortations and lamentations of the Prophets, and passages of poetry woven in throughout. In the New Testament, Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven with poetic epithets such as “a treasure hid in a field,” calling the Son of God “the true vine,” “the light of the world,” “the good shepherd,” and “the way, the truth, and the life.” The Gospels reverberate with allusions to the poetry of the Old Testament; the last book of all is Revelation, a visionary poem. The Bible, in other words, asks to be read poetically from start to end, and yet readers have rarely considered what that might mean, much less heeded that call. In The Bible and Poetry, the poet and scholar Michael Edwards reshapes our understanding of the Bible and religious belief, arguing that poetry is not an ornamental or accidental feature but is central to both. He speaks personally of his early, unanticipated, transformative encounters with scripture. He offers close, insightful, and resonant readings of biblical passages. Poetry, as he sees it, is the vital and necessary medium of the Creator’s word, and the truth of the Bible is not a question of precepts and propositions but of a direct experience of its poetry, its power.

A new collection from one of our favorite poets. Fourteen “Idiot Psalms,” surrounded by dozens of other poems, make this his most challenging collection yet. “Idiot Psalm 1” O God Belovéd if obliquely so, dimly apprehended in the midst of this, the fraught obscuring fog of my insufficiently capacious ken, Ostensible Lover of our kind—while apparently aloof—allow that I might glimpse once more Your shadow in the land, avail for me, a second time, the sense of dire Presence in the pulsing hollow near the heart. Once more, O Lord, from Your Enormity incline your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy of immolation, if You will.

As well as the name of a virus, a corona is a crown, the pearly glow around the sun in certain astronomical conditions and a poetic form where interlinking lines connect a sequence. It is the perfect name therefore for this new collection of 150 poems by the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite, each one written in response to the Bible’s 150 psalms as they appear in William Coverdale’s timeless translation. The Psalms express every human emotion with disarming honesty, as anger and thankfulness alike are directed at God. All of life is here with its moments of beauty and its times of despair and shame. Like the Psalms themselves, the poems do not avoid the cursing and glorying over the downfall of your enemies, but wrestle honestly with them as we do when we come to say them.

This is a modern paraphrase of chapters from various books of the Hebrew Bible (Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jonah, etc.) and Apocrypha (Judith and Maccabees).

Struggling to accept her impending blindness, the speaker in Julia B. Levine’s fifth collection of poetry, Ordinary Psalms, asks everyday life to help her learn how to see beyond appearances into fundamental truths. As she contemplates the loss of one friend to cancer and another to suicide, along with her own visual impairment, Levine holds the world “close as I needed / to see.” Imagistic, lyrical, and at times imploring divine intervention from a god she does not know or trust, these poems curse and praise the extraordinary place we live in and are in danger of losing. Lamenting that “this world is a mortal affliction / with wounds in the beautiful,” Ordinary Psalms provides a seductive and lyric rumination on radiance, loss, and grief.