Named after Solomon Ibn Gabirol’s own sharp self-description, Vulture in a Cage is the most extensive collection of the eleventh-century Hebrew poet’s works ever to be published in English. Here, vital poems of praise, lament, and complaint sit along­side devotional poetry, love poetry, descrip­tive meditations on nature, and epigrams. Obsessed with the impediments of the body and the material world, Ibn Gabirol ambitiously dreamed of breaking through corporeal constraints and launching his soul into the realm of the intellect. He hurled unforgivable insults at his contemporaries, yet he resented their refusal to grant him the recognition that he felt was his due and lamented his own inability to find human companionship. In his secular poetry, he bewails the unattainability of true spiritual wisdom; but in his devotional poetry, his voice seems to emerge from a realm of pure spirituality.