Synopses & Reviews
“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” —Mary Oliver
This luminous anthology brings together great poets from around the world whose work transcends culture and time. Their words reach past the outer divisions to the universal currents of love and revelation that move and inspire us all. These poems urge us to wake up and love. They also call on us to relinquish our grip on ideas and opinions that confine us and, instead, to risk moving forward into the life that is truly ours.
In his selection, Roger Housden has placed strong emphasis on contemporary voices such as the American poet laureate Billy Collins and the Nobel Prize-winners Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney, but the collection also includes some timeless echoes of the past in the form of work by masters such as Goethe, Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson.
The tens of thousands of readers of Roger Housdens “Ten Poems” series will welcome this beautiful harvest of poems that both open the mind and heal the heart.
Synopsis
This luminous anthology of poetry includes voices from across the centuries and around the world who have sung the inner song of the human spirit. Their words reach past the outer divisions of time and culture to the universal currents that move and inspire us all. Among the poets that Roger Housden has selected for this collection are: Wendell Berry, Naomi Shihab-Nye, Robert Bly, Jane Hirshfield, W. B. Yeats, Thomas Merton, Philip Larkin, Robert Pinsky, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Marge Piercy, Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Galway Kinnell, and Nikki Giovanni. In addition to the 110 poems, there is a remarkable introductory essay, as well as short biographies of all the poets and an index of first lines. Many of the readers of the ''Ten Poems'' series are discovering poetry for the first time and are eager to know where to turn next. With its wealth of poems that open the mind and heal the heart, Risking Everything is the perfect next step.
About the Author
ROGER HOUSDEN is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Ten Poems to Change Your Life and Ten Poems to Open Your Heart, and also a recent novella, Chasing Rumi. He gives recitals of ecstatic poetry from the worlds great literary and spiritual traditions. He lives in Woodstock, New York. You can email him at
[email protected].