“Vul­ture in a cage,” Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s own self-descrip­tion, is an apt image for a poet who was obsessed with the imped­i­ments posed by the body and the mate­r­i­al world to the real­iza­tion of his spir­i­tu­al ambi­tion of ele­vat­ing his soul to the empyre­an. Ibn Gabirol’s poet­ry is enor­mous­ly influ­en­tial, lay­ing the ground­work for gen­er­a­tions of Hebrew poets who fol­low him – rocky and harsh, full of orig­i­nal imagery and barbed wit, and yet no one sur­passed him for the limpid beau­ty of his devo­tion­al verse. His poet­ry is at once a record of the inner life of a tor­ment­ed poet and a mon­u­ment to the Judeo-Ara­bic cul­ture that pro­duced him. This book con­tains the most exten­sive col­lec­tion of Ibn Gabirol’s poet­ry ever pub­lished in English.