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Summary: Risk everything "and you find your soul."
Review: "Suffering is part of how it is on earth," editor Roger Housden observes in his Introduction to this luminous collection of poems; "it is an inherent part of the fabric of existence. And if we are lucky, it will break our hearts open" (p. xiii). Housden (TEN POEMS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE; TEN POEMS TO OPEN YOUR HEART) knows great poetry. He has drawn the 110 poems collected in this anthology from around the world, and from every era of history. When read together, "they represent a great song of what is possible for us--all the ways in which a life can be fully lived" (p. xv). These poems reveal that if we risk stepping out of the familiar lamentations and the humdrum details of our daily existence, we might just discover "the White Heat" of our soul. "Listen," Mary Oliver challenges us, "are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"Other poets collected in this outstanding anthology of accessible poetry include America's Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, Nobel Prize winner, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Robert Bly, Rumi, Jane Hirshfield, W. B. Yeats, Galway Kinnell, Wendell Berry, Emily Dickinson, Kabir, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, and William Stafford. G. Merritt
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