Oludamini Ogunnaike’s remarkable volume of English Sufi poetry is aptly entitled The Book of Clouds. These poems are a gift to their author and are likewise a gift to his audience, just as rain is a boon to its recipients. These poems revive the barren land of our hearts which have become dried up by scholasticism, selfishness, social media, and secularism. They distinctively draw on the rich traditions of Arabic and Persian Sufi poetry, while also articulating a Sufi vision that speaks to contemporary audiences whose language is English, and whose worldview is shaped by English. Ogunnaike brings his connection to the lived tradition of tasawwuf and distinctive accomplishments as a leading scholar and Muslim thinker to bear on each of this volume’s poems, demonstrating not only the vitality of Sufism in English but also a profound relationship to and continuation of the entire tradition of Sufi poetry found in every major Islamic language, past and present. The poems enshrined in The Book of Clouds…in many ways form a veritable commentary upon the Islamic tradition in riveting English verses of great sophistication, rhythmic beauty, and even humor, written in our time and for our time, but which transcend all time.

This collection of poems…represents a bold pathway for the appreciation of Sufi literary aesthetics in the English language. These original poems draw inspiration from a number of cultures and literary traditions, but most prominent to me are the love lyrics known as ghazals…. If we, for the duration of a poem, or perhaps even longer, enjoy the privilege of sharing in God’s admiration of Himself, then we should be grateful. Poetry such as Ogunnaike’s—when read in the state of rapture and imagination in which it was written—can open the doors to a hall in which glances and longing translate to the deepest yearning in every human soul to be known, to be seen, and to discover the reality of existence.

The noblest and cruelest of worldly and celestial meanings are at times intoxicatingly diffused, and at others numinously seized and bravely resisted by Oludamini Ogunnaike’s multilingual musings, multicultural wizardry, and multidimensional scoping.

For more than a millennium, poetic hymns celebrating the endless facets of divine and human love—often set to local musical traditions—have become central to a host of Islamic languages, cultures and ritual observances, from West Africa across to Indonesia. Throughout that period, those poems of praise and longing often grew out of a common set of originally Arabic themes, imagery, and a shared set of poetic genres, meters and rhymes. In his The Book of Clouds, Oludamini Ogunnaike’s remarkable, wide-ranging collection of original poems, he has creatively adapted his own contemporary insights and inspirations into deeply moving English verse drawing on all of those earlier genres. His always personally revealing poems here range from more familiar religious and devotional subjects to elegies inspired by heartbreaking current events.