The Measure of the Heart. Este artículo no está disponible.The Measure of the Heart

The Measure of the Heart

Sufi and Metaphysical Poems
by Roberto Minichini
The Measure of the Heart is a collection of poems rooted in Sufi spirituality and metaphysical discipline, written against the background of a world marked by excess, acceleration, and loss of orientation. These poems do not seek to console, persuade, or decorate belief. They seek to restore measure.
Drawing on Islamic mystical traditions—both Sunni and Shi‘i—alongside a broader metaphysical horizon, the poems explore remembrance, prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, silence, destiny, love, authority, humility, and the purification of the heart. Figures such as prophets, Imams, saints, and unnamed servants appear not as legends or abstractions, but as criteria: living standards of alignment, responsibility, and fidelity.
The language of the book is deliberately restrained. Love is treated as disciplined intimacy rather than sentimental escape. Human eros and divine devotion are held together without confusion or romanticization. Ecstasy is acknowledged, but sobriety governs. Knowledge is honored, but humility remains its condition. Throughout the collection, spirituality is inseparable from ethics, and inward depth never excuses disorder of life.
Historical landscapes—Persia, Syria, Egypt—emerge as witnesses to transmission rather than objects of nostalgia. Ritual acts are presented not as cultural artifacts, but as practices of orientation. Silence, patience, and restraint recur as forms of intelligence in a time dominated by noise and reaction.
The Measure of the Heart is not a manual, nor a system. It is a book of orientation, addressed to readers willing to slow down, to read attentively, and to accept that some truths do not announce themselves loudly. These poems do not offer answers. They offer posture.

About the Author
Roberto Minichini was born in 1973 in Mainz, Germany, to an Italian father from Naples and a Croatian mother from Zagreb. He lives in Gorizia, Italy, a border city whose layered history reflects many of the concerns that inform his work: transmission, identity without enclosure, and fidelity without nostalgia.
He is an Italian poet and writer, as well as an independent scholar of Islamic metaphysics, with particular attention to Sufi and Shi‘i spiritual and intellectual traditions. His work is informed by long-term study of philosophy, religious history, psychology, and traditional cosmologies, alongside sustained engagement with European literary and philosophical traditions, especially German and Russian culture.
Minichini’s writing develops outside institutional frameworks and literary schools, by deliberate choice. His poetry resists both spiritual consumerism and ideological reduction, favoring instead discipline, measure, and responsibility toward meaning. The Measure of the Heart is his first major collection of poetry in English.