Voices of Heaven and Rhymes of God is a monumental bilingual poetry collection that transforms the poetic and narrative books of the Bible into metrical verse in both English and Chinese. Completed over a decade of devoted craftsmanship, this treasury of over five hundred poems stands as a remarkable fusion of biblical devotion, classical English prosody, and Chinese poetic tradition — a work the author aptly describes as "a eulogy to heaven" that "gives us the meaning of being, philosophical ideas and moral values for life."

Drawing from eight books of the Bible — Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations — the collection encompasses the full range of the biblical poetic canon, from the suffering and vindication of Job, through the praise and lament of the Psalms, the wisdom of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, the ecstatic love of the Song of Songs, to the soaring prophecies of Isaiah, the sorrowful warnings of Jeremiah, and the funeral songs of Lamentations. Each poem is rendered in strict metrical form with rhyme and rhythm in both languages, creating a unique bilingual symphony that resonates across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

The collection is organized into ten sections that mirror the order of the biblical text:

• Open-volume Poems — A prelude celebrating God's creation and the promise of a new heaven and earth.

• Poems From Deuteronomy — Eight poems drawn from Moses' admonitions and exhortations, including four sonnets and three free verses, all rhyming in both English and Chinese.

• Odes to Job — Forty-nine poems from the forty-two chapters of Job, employing heroic couplets and heroic quatrains to give voice to the sufferer's anguish, the friends' accusations, and God's majestic response.

• Rhymes of Psalms — The largest section, with one hundred and eighty poems from the one hundred and fifty Psalms, ranging across sonnets, heroic couplets, and heroic quatrains — a vast tapestry of praise, prayer, repentance, and trust.

• Verses of Proverbs (Epigrams) — Forty-four poems of exhortation in heroic couplets and heroic quatrains, distilling the wisdom literature into memorable epigrammatic verse.

• Ballads of Ecclesiastes — Twenty-six ballads, including twelve in terza rima and nine terza rima sonnets modeled on Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, meditating on the vanity and meaning of life.

• Crown Sonnets of Song of Songs — Fifteen interconnected sonnets forming a crown of sonnets from the Bible's great love poem, using Shakespearean and Marilyn Hacker rhyme patterns — a dazzling display of the sonneteer's art.

• Anthems From Isaiah — One hundred and fifteen anthems from the sixty-six chapters of Isaiah, blending heroic couplets and heroic quatrains into a prophetic chorus of judgment and hope.

• Lyrics From Jeremiah — Seventy-one narrative lyrics from the book of Jeremiah, weaving heroic double-line and four-line stanzas into a poignant testament of warning and compassion.

• The Psyche of Lamentations — Six poems of mourning, including two sixains, one cross-rhyme quatrain, and two heroic couplets, giving voice to Jerusalem's grief and the prayer for mercy.

What distinguishes this collection is its unwavering commitment to classical metrical form. The author wields iambic pentameter and iambic tetrameter with the assurance of a seasoned scholar of English prosody, moving fluently among heroic couplets, Shakespearean sonnets, terza rima, sixains, and crown sonnets — forms associated with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Shelley, and Wordsworth — while simultaneously crafting Chinese verse that honors the tonal and rhyming traditions of classical Chinese poetry. The result is a bilingual body of work in which each poem exists as a complete artistic statement in its own language, not a translation but a parallel creation.

The author, Liu Jianfeng, is a retired professor of English from Jiangnan University in Wuxi, China. A graduate of Lanzhou University with a Master of Arts in English Language and Literature, he served as a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Hong Kong, and is a council member of the Chinese Association of English Poetry Studies and the Chinese Association of American Studies. His scholarly career spans over four decades, during which he published more than forty articles on British and American literature, delivered lectures on English poetry at fourteen universities across China, and authored two previous books: Essays on Western Literature Studies (2005) and English Letters and Essays (2016). The present work was written under the guidance of Professor Nie Zhenzhao's An Introduction to English Verse Rhythm and took shape from July 2016, when the author first began writing poems from the book of Deuteronomy, through years of sustained creative labor. Two hundred and ten of these poems were previously published in the Journal of Literature and Art Studies across eight issues between May 2017 and July 2022, with two accompanying critical essays serving as the foundation for the book's preface and prologue.