Product Description

For brides and grooms who want to give their weddings new depth and meaning, two acclaimed poet-translators have gathered a stunning collection of poems and prose that will add a unique and personal dimension to the ceremony.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #397645 in Books
• Published on: 1994-05-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Ingram
For brides and grooms who want to give their weddings new depth and meaning, two acclaimed poet-translators have gathered a stunning collection of poems and prose that will add a unique and personal dimension to the ceremony. Includes examples of wedding ceremonies from various cultures.

About the Author

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, California, where he teaches at the University of California. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. A MacArthur Fellow and a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he has published poems, literary essays, and translations. He is married to the poet Brenda Hillman.

Customer Reviews

an excellent and varied collection, not Christian centric
This is the most useful book I found among many I looked at for writing our ceremony, which will incorporate buddhist and taoist ideas and language. The only readings collection I've found so far that goes beyond the Judeo-Christian/Western emphasis to incorporate Islamic, Buddhist writers and some poets beyond the usual suspects. The anthology features both long and short readings and sample ceremonies from a variety of traditions. I found it indispensible.

an excellent and varied collection, not Christian centric
This is the most useful book I found among many I looked at for writing our ceremony, which will incorporate buddhist and taoist ideas and language. The only readings collection I've found so far that goes beyond the Judeo-Christian/Western emphasis to incorporate Islamic, Buddhist writers and some poets beyond the usual suspects. The anthology features both long and short readings and sample ceremonies from a variety of traditions. I found it indispensible.

Helpful when writing your own ceremony
This book was invaluable to my husband and I when we planned our wedding a few years ago, though you will need other sources as well. I was finishing up college and he had begun his graduate program, so we were already extremely busy. With the help of this book we were able to write our entire wedding ceremony ourselves. I didn't have much experience with weddings, and I didn't know anything about the usual structure or components of a wedding ceremony. In the back of this book are many wedding ceremony examples for different religions or for a non-religious ceremony.

I highly recommend taking the time to write your own ceremony. It is such a wonderful time before marriage that you can spend together exploring deeply what marriage means to you and what kind of ceremony you want to celebrate your union with. It helps to have lots of poetry anthologies and books of poetry by your favorite poets. This book is great because it has so many poems about love and marriage. We used many poems from this book in our ceremony. We also used a lot of Rumi poems. We even combined a few Rumi poems to create a beautiful reading that felt personal to us. We began the ceremony singing a Sanskrit prayer that meant "May all beings be peaceful and happy". It was nice to have a ceremony that was personally very spiritual and combined many different religions. We also had two friends compose music to two of "The Dances of Universal Peace" using Indian instruments. During the ceremony we also planted a rose tree.

We always say our vows to each other because they are so beautiful, and on our anniversaries we read through our entire ceremony, and sing the songs.

"The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you
not knowing how blind I was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along."

Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne)

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