Dark Night (poems And Selected Prose)

The profound, hugely influential exploration of spiritual growth and transformation, from one of the great Spanish mystics and poets

‘Oh living flame of love,
how tenderly you scorch me’

The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross, has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T. S. Eliot. This new edition of his essential works, in a sensitive and luminous translation by Martha Sprackland, gathers John of the Cross’s complete poems and a selection of his prose, including from his extended commentary on the poem ‘Dark Night’. In his immediate, sensual writing, we see a soul searching for meaning and union with the divine: both meek and bold, deserving and undeserving, oscillating between light and dark, soaring and falling, desperation and salvation. Dark Night gives us a picture of faith at once confronting and inspiriting, and of the power of words as a means of spiritual transcendence.

Translated by Martha Sprackland, with an Introduction by Colin Thompson

John of the Cross (1542 –1591) was born in Fonteveros, Spain and joined the Carmelite Order as a young man. After meeting St Teresa of Ávila, he joined her attempts at reforming the order, embracing a more stringently monastic and studious life than Carmelites then practised. Arrested, imprisoned and tortured for his beliefs, he experienced a profound spiritual awakening during his captivity which inspired an outpouring of mystical poetry and writings, including ‘The Ascent of Mount Carmel’, ‘The Dark Night’ and ‘The Spiritual Canticle’. He was canonized as a saint in 1726.

Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator from the north of England. She has translated poetry by Ana Gorría, Verónica Viola Fisher and Gladys Mendía, and short fiction by Sara Mesa. In 2021 she was shortlisted for the Peirene–Stevns Translation Prize. Her debut collection of poems, CITADEL (Pavilion/LUP, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, and the Costa Poetry Award.