Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation

by Roger Housden (Editor)

“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 Housden’s “Ten Poems” series will welcome this beautiful harvest of poems that both open the mind and heal the heart.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Love, Anthologies, Reference, Inspirational, Spirituality

192 pages, Hardcover

First published March 18, 2003

About the author

Roger Housden is the author of some twenty books of non fiction, including the best selling Ten Poems series. His new book, SAVED BY BEAUTY: ADVENTURES OF AN AMERICAN ROMANTIC IN IRAN, comes out on May 17 2011 with Broadway Books.

Reviews

[Hertta · Rating 4 out of 5]

En yleensä lue runoja niin mun on pakko myöntää et luin tän koska Gracie Abrams sano jossain haastattelussa et tää on sen lemppari. Tällä kertaa oikeesti mietin niitä runoja tarkemmin enkä vaan kahlannut läpi niinkuin yleensä tekisin. Mun mielestä tää kokoelma oli hyvin valittu ja kirjoitus tosi kaunista. Monet oli aika uskonnollisia joten en voinut kauheesti samaistua. Tykkäsin kuitenkin ja haluun alkaa lukee enemmän runoja. :)

(Mun lemppari oli For the sake of strangers)

[Paul Manytravels · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every handyman and homeowner has somewhere in his work area a collection of screws, nuts, bolts, nails and assorted others hardware that is kept around just in case they are needed for some future repair or project. An anthology of any kind is a lot like these collections: it is kept for a time when it might be needed. A poetry anthology is needed every bit as often as the collection of screws and bolts. It serves us in times of joy, in times of sorrow, in times of depression, in time of love. But not just any anthology will do. Poetry comes to the reader in so many styles and so many forms that just the right poetry is needed for those times when poetry addresses the emotions in ways nothing else can.
Housden's collections have always hit just the right chord for me. While there are countless anthologies available, Housden often fill the bill of being exactly what I am looking for. This collection, Risking Everything, offers a range of poems that is sure to provide me with more than a few that are exactly what I am looking for. I come back to it again and again whenever I am feeling like poetry is just the thing to make me feel better, more pleased with life, and more in need of a little emotional nudge to keep me on track and mindful of the joys and challenges of being alive

[Cherie Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

110 great poems to ponder on.

[Lauren Hoagland · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection! My personal favorites:

- when death comes by Mary Oliver
- love after love by Derek Walcott**
- my dead friends by Marie Howe
- so much happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye**
- sweet darkness by David Whyte**
- the very short sutra on the meeting of the Buddha and the goddess by Rick Fields
- some kiss we want by Rumi
- the man of Tao by Chuang Tzu

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a nice selection of poetry but sometimes the organization seemed a bit odd. Overall, I liked the choice of poetry and it was nice to wake up every morning and digest a couple of poems before starting another day of "sheltering in place."

[ginny clifford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry forever

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best compilation of the series by this editor.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
- Mary Oliver, When Death Comes

Love after Love
Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Wild Geese
Mary Oliver

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

On Angels
Czeslaw Milosz

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a martinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

My Dead Friends
Marie Howe

I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling-whatever leads
to joy, they always answer, to more life and less worry.

I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes where it’s green in there, a green vase,

and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.

Billy’s already gone through the frightening door, whatever he says I’ll do.

Today, like Every Other Day
Rumi

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
- translated by Coleman Barks


So Much Happiness
for Michael
Naomi Shihab Nye

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Sunset
Rainer Maria Rilke

one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star

Weathering
Fleur Adcock

Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face
catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes
with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:
that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young for ever, to pass.

I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,

happy is how I look, and that’s all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,
and the years work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather-beaten as well

that’s little enough lost, a fair bargain
for a year among the lakes and fells, when simply
to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion.

Sweet Darkness
David Whyte

anything of anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

- from The House of Belonging

You See I Want a Lot
Rainer Maria Rilke

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret

- translated by Robert Bly

The Greatest Love
Anna Swirszczynska

She is sixty. She lives
the greatest love of her life.

She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one,
her hair streams in the wind.
Her dear one says:
“You have hair like pearls.”

Her children say:
“Old fool.”

- translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

The Very Short Sutra on the Meeting of the Buddha and the Goddess
Rick Fields

Be your breath. Ah
Smile, Hey
And relax, Ho
And remember this: You can't miss.

To Have Without Holding
Marge Piercy

Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch ; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

I Thank You
ee cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e. cummings
1894-1962

Postscript
Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Ripeness
Jane Hirshfield

Ripeness is
what falls away with ease.
Not only the heavy apple,
the pear,
but also the dried brown strands
of autumn iris from their core.
To let your body
love this world
that gave itself to your care
in all of its ripeness,
with ease,
and will take itself from you
in equal ripeness and ease,
is also harvest.
And however sharply
you are tested —
this sorrow, that great love —
it too will leave on that clean knife.

– from “The October Palace”

In Blackwater Woods
Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.


Kindness
Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

The Same Inside
Anna Swirszczynska

Walking to your place for a love fest
I saw at a street corner
an old beggar women.
I took her hand,
kissed her delicate cheek,
we talked, she was
the same inside as I am,
from the same kind,
I sensed this instantly
as a dog knows by scent
another dog.
I gave her money,
I could not part from her.
After all, one needs
someone who is close.
And then I no longer knew
why I was walking to your place.

Oddjob, a Bull Terrier
Derek Walcott

You prepare for one sorrow,
but another comes.
It is not like the weather,
you cannot brace yourself,
the unreadiness is all.
Your companion, the woman,
the friend next to you,
the child at your side,
and the dog,
we tremble for them,
we look seaward and muse
it will rain.
We shall get ready for rain;
you do not connect
the sunlight altering
the darkening oleanders
in the sea-garden,
the gold going out of the palms.
You do not connect this,
the fleck of the drizzle
on your flesh,
with the dog’s whimper,
the thunder doesn’t frighten,
the readiness is all;
what follows at your feet
is trying to tell you
the silence is all:
it is deeper than the readiness,
it is sea-deep,
earth-deep,
love-deep.

The silence
is stronger than thunder,
we are stricken dumb and deep
as the animals who never utter love
as we do, except
it becomes unutterable
and must be said,
in a whimper,
in tears,
in the drizzle that comes to our eyes
not uttering the loved thing’s name,
the silence of the dead,
the silence of the deepest buried love is
the one silence,
and whether we bear it for beast,
for child, for woman, or friend,
it is the one love, it is the same,
and it is blest
deepest by loss
it is blest, it is blest.

For the Raindrop
Ghalib

It's the rose's unfolding, Ghalib, that creates the desire to see --
In every color and circumstance, may the eyes be open for what comes.
- translated by Jane Hirshfield

A Place to Sit
Kabir

Don’t go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.

- translated by Robert Bly

Breath

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.

- translated by Robert Bly

The Swan
Rainer Maria Rilke

This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.

And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.

- translation by Robert Bly

The Unknown Flute
Kabir

Who is it we spend our entire life loving?

Eyes
Czelaw Milosz

honorable eyes. You are not in the best shape.
I receive from you an image, less than sharp,
And if a color, then it's dimmed.
And you were a pack of royal hounds
With whom I would set forth in the early morning.
My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things,
Lands and cities. Islands and oceans.
Together we greeted immense sunrises,
When the fresh air invited us to run
Along trails just dry from cold night dew.
Now what you have seen is hidden inside
And changed into memory or dreams
Slowly I move away from the fair of the world
And I notice in myself a distaste
For monkeyish dresses, shrieks and drum beats.
What a relief. Alone with my meditation
On the basic similarity in humans
And their tiny grain of dissimilarity.
Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point
That grows large and takes me in.

-translated by Czeslaw Milosz, Carol Milosz, and Renata Gorczynski

The Man of Tao
Chuang Tzu

The man of Tao
Remains unknown
Perfect virtue
Produces nothing
'No-self'
Is 'True-Self.'
And the greatest man
Is Nobody.

- translated by Thomas Merton

Prayer Is an Egg
Rumi

On Resurrection Day God will say, “What did you do with
the strength and energy

your food gave you on earth? How did you use your eyes?
What did you make with

your five senses while they were dimming and playing out?
I gave you hands and feet

as tools for preparing the ground for planting. Did you,
in the health I gave,

do the plowing?” You will not be able to stand when you
hear those questions. You

will bend double, and finally acknowledge the glory. God
will say, “Lift

your head and answer the questions.” Your head will rise
a little, then slump

again. “Look at me! Tell what you’ve done.” You try,
but you fall back flat

as a snake. “I want every detail. Say!” Eventually you
will be able to get to

a sitting position. “Be plain and clear. I have given you
such gifts. What did

you do with them?” You turn to the right looking to the
prophets for help, as

though to say, I am stuck in the mud of my life. Help me
out of this! They

will answer, those kings, “The time for helping is past.
The plow stands there in

the field. You should have used it.” Then you turn to
the left, where your family

is, and they will say, “Don’t look at us? This conversation
is between you and your

creator.” Then you pray the prayer that is the essence
of every ritual: God,

I have no hope. I am torn to shreds. You are my first and
last and only refuge.

Don’t do daily prayers like a bird pecking, moving its head
up and down. Prayer is an egg.

Hatch out the total helplessness inside.

- by Rumi, from The Soul of Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, 2001

[Danielle Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book of poetry - very accessible. I would not have picked it up based on the title (not much into love poems) but it was at a library book sale and I had room in my bag so in it went. (And I’m glad it did). The second part of the title was right - this book was actually a lot more spiritual than I had anticipated and held many revelations.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great selection of poems that offer food for the soul. Of course, not all were my cup of tea, but most I think had something beautiful worth pondering.

[Taylor Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an amazing collection of poems for me as I’m not well-versed in poetry. He did a great job of curating the poems in the book, and I would say I enjoyed 75% of them. Some of the poems were incredible, and I was introduced to new poets throughout that I’m excited to continue exploring.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

For The Sake Of Strangers

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another – a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a retarded child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them –
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

by Dorianne Laux

I am grateful to Housden for his collections of poetry. This is the second one I have read and I would like to read the rest. He always introduces me to new poems and poets. Also he usually includes poems that I already know – however the context of his collections helps me to see those poems more clearly.

In this collection, Housden included A Blessing by James Wright and I Thank You by e. e. cummings. It was good to see these both again along with other favorites.

If you don’t read poetry, I would urge you to try again. I know that many of us have had teachers who meant well, but who taught us that poetry is hard and we need to work to understand what the poet meant. Instead of working, I read poems out loud, slowly. If they hit a nerve or make me happy, I might read them again. If not, then I move on the next one. I know that not every poem is for every reader.

Housden’s collections lend themselves to slow, contemplative readings. I will be visiting with this book again. I hope other readers will try it.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

My father once said that when you are twenty years old or so, life is so intense that you can understand and write poetry and philosophy. Later, I guess, life is more settled down, and maybe that gift is gone. This is a good collection for re-finding that gift. You know how a poem can capture a feeling or experience or something more intangible. You wonder if anyone else sees the same thing you have seen, and yes, maybe someone else has. Here's a poem I found in this book a week or so ago, on Good Friday -- the reference to darkness was especially poignant, and the whole poem - freedom, aliveness - made total sense.

Sweet Darkness
David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the whole world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can ever see.

You must learn one thing
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

[Kitty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes it is a relief to have an anthology instead of constant reading of tottering piles of books, magazines and an overwhelming sense of futility. And with a title, in brackets, "risking everything" I appreciate the efforts of Roger Housden to put in one volume the poem which respond to the Mary Oliver quote that prefaces his introduction. "Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"

In one week, I found the perfect poem for a friend who just found out she had throat cancer; 6 poems for a friend lighting a Yahrzeit candle; poems that give me courage and that I want to share with my students; poems for my friend who is leaving his career as 2nd violin chair in an orchestra due to political pressures his outspoken nature reveals; poems I've loved and cherished and am glad to see again.

Indeed a harvest.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could give this book a thousand stars, I'd still want to give it more--it's absolutely my favorite book of poems ever, and I am very picky about compilations, even when they're the best of from a single author. I usually feel that having more than 25 or so poems in one book is overwhelming and I end up not really reading any of them, but this book keeps me fascinated and moved over and over again. I bought it on an intuitive hunch, I've slugged it around so much that I've lost it and then bought it again. If I could only have one book in the whole world, this would be it--it's really that good.

[Anna Keating · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gift from a friend. The best kind of friend. The best kind of gift. Reading a few of these aloud to another friend last night I was returned to my pre-crisis self and felt perfectly happy. Some old friends in here and some new ones. Some great some okay. Poetry is a balm.

+So Much Happiness
Naomi Shihab Nye

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

+The Journey by Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
What you had to do, and began, Though the voices around you Kept shouting
Their bad advice‚
Though the whole house
Began to tremble
And you felt the old tug
At your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
Each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do, Though the wind pried
With its stiff fingers
At the very foundations‚ Though their melancholy
Was terrible.
It was already late
Enough, and a wild night,
And the road full of fallen Branches and stones.
But little by little,
As you left their voices behind, The stars began to burn Through the sheets of clouds, And there was a new voice, Which you slowly
Recognized as your own,
That kept you company
As you strode deeper and deeper Into the world,
Determined to do
The only thing you could do‚ Determined to save
The only life you could save.

+On Angels Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice -- no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one
do what you can.

[Nick Milinazzo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I quiver as a body in rapture,
I quiver as a wing,
I am an explosion,
I overstep myself,
I am a fountain,
I have its resilience.
Excess,
a thousand excesses,
strength,
song of gushing strength.

As I have been interested in getting more into poetry, a friend lent me this collection. Between its pages are inspiring aspirations; poignant and reflective pieces about love, revelation, faith, or the combination of them all. There are a wide range of styles and authors, some of which were born hundreds of years ago. My favorite piece was "To Have Without Holding" by Marge Piercy. The poems I responded to the strongest were the ones about love, whether romantic or familial. I appreciated this eclectic accumulation very much.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great sampling of a variety of poets from Rilke to Mary Oliver to Robert Bly to Rumi. While the subtitle says they are poems of love and revelation, their subject matter is more varied than that. A worthwhile read that makes me want to read more of the poets individually where the full force of their vision can shine through. My only real complaint is that I would have liked it to be much longer and I would have liked to have seen the poems organized more by subject or theme or author.

[Kaitlyn]

Initially, I tried to read through this poetry anthology like I’d read a regular book but I found myself struggling to understand what I was reading and forcing myself to finish it. What I did instead was to pick up the book at moments I felt like it and read one or a few poems multiple times throughout the months. Now I know how I would approach future poetry books. I liked the variation of poems throughout. There were a few poems and a lot of lines that made me think/I felt connected to.

[Denise Caruzzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really excellent collection of poetry! it includes some of my favorite writers and introduced me to new long-time friends. It reminds me of loves almost forgotten and the great possibilities of this world. If you admire one of these authors, you will be grateful for the assembly of voices and ideas.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been enjoying this collection slowly over the past few months, reading and rereading my favorites and memorizing short bits. I'll probably return to it in the future.

My only complaint is that the title and cover are misleading. I would not say that the majority of the poems are about love and/or revelation, and I don't know what apples have to do with either of those things.

[Bill Glose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Housden's introduction was excellent, and so were some of the poems, but the vast majority of the book was Buddhist dogma that had no lyricism. It was just the same message over and over: just sit still and don't try to do anything.

[Allison Crow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes I did start reading this because Gracie Abrams recommended it in a YouTube video, why do you ask???

Anyways I've never read a collection of poems before, and these were good? I think? Idk I'm not a poetry girlie. I liked a lot of these though!

[Stella Kinzler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would definitely recommend! This poetry book is really good! I’ll defently be picking up another poetry book soon! I found this book because Gracie Abram’s recommended it! Some of my favorite poems were:
Today like every other day
Milkweed
Wild geese
The road not taken

[Jon Tupper · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's on my nightstand.
It's a healing set of amazing writing.
Some of these poems, that I read occasionally before trying to rest, simply stop my mind.

[Roxanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poems, some by already-favorites, and some by new-favorites. I feel like I snagged a treasure, and I'll definitely be re-reading.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved so many poems in here -- lots of dog ears!

[Christine Heron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thumb through some poems and enjoyed the poet bios in the back.

[Barbara Crofford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring

[Peg! · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sublime collection of poetry given to me by a dear college friend. Reading it, I felt like she'd given me back to myself.

[zac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of poems!