SelfScape Book of Hours

This new translation of selected poems from Rainer Maria Rilke's Das Stunden-Buch (Book of Hours) includes images of sculpture and artwork by Auguste Rodin, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Emil Orlik, Heinrich Vogeler, Ernst Barlach, Käthe Kollwitz and other artists known to Rilke and his contemporaries. It represents a modern take on the medieval Book of Hours, a personal devotional book of prayers for the Christian layperson that often was illustrated with religious miniatures and illuminated text. The novel approach of the SelfScape Book of Hours: Rainer Maria Rilke Edition to Rilke's first major work of poetry shows how Rilke deconstructed the traditional components of the medieval Book of Hours - Sequences of the Gospels, Hours of the Virgin, Cross and Holy Spirit, Penitential Psalms, Office of the Dead and Suffrages - and used that medieval form as a vehicle for his own unique poetic conversation with God. The three individual books of Rilke's Book of Hours - the Book of Monastic Life, Book of Pilgrimage and Book of Poverty and Death - are reordered here to map back to the medieval Book of Hours format and to progress through the monastic daily hours of prayer - Matins and Lauds from midnight to dawn, Prime, Terce, Sext and None during the daylight hours, Vespers at sunset and Compline at bedtime.