Product Description

The fourth volume in the popular series that began with Ten Poems to Change Your Life, Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime focuses on what it means to be truly human. In it, Roger Housden offers us poems on life and death, happiness, seeing ourselves in relation to the world, and, of course, the ineffable—the things that really matter when the chips are down. He describes these passionate poems as “bread for the soul and fire for the spirit.”

The poets Housden has chosen are Billy Collins, Hayden Carruth, Dorianne Laux, James Wright, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Mary Oliver from the United States, D. H. Lawrence and John Keats from England, Rainer Maria Rilke from Germany, Fleur Adcock from New Zealand, and Seng-Ts’an from sixth-century China. And yes, that adds up to eleven, not ten. Housden decided to include a bonus poem for his faithful readers in this, the final volume of the series. As before, Housden’s luminous essays provide an elegant and easy passage into the sometimes daunting world of poetry, enabling readers to feel that in him they have found a trusted guide and mentor.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #379981 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-26
• Released on: 2004-10-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

From Booklist
*Starred Review* The outstanding achievement of popular inspirational writer Housden's Ten Poems books (see also Ten Poems to Set You Free [BKL D 1 03] and Ten Poems That Open Your Heart [BKL Ja 1 & 15 03]) is that they present poets and poetry that most of his usual audience will embrace but might never otherwise encounter. He finds a poem by former cook, maid, and gas station manager Dorianne Laux, "For the Sake of Strangers," about how the kindness of strangers keeps her from stepping off the edge of despair, and after it he tells his own story about a trek through the Sinai desert; so doing, he lifts the poem, already powerful on its own, to a higher level of meaning. He repeats the procedure with a rich variety of poets, from Keats to Naomi Shihab Nye, from sixth-century Buddhist poet Seng-Ts'an to Mary Oliver, offering enriching tastes of their best work and, with his subsequent impressions, priming his readers to plumb themselves for their own interpretations of the poems. What better method is there for sharing the love of an art form? Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Roger Housden, a native of Bath, England, emigrated to the United States in 1998 and now lives in New York City. He is the author of Ten Poems to Change Your Life, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart, and Ten Poems to Set You Free, and editor of Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation. You can e-mail him at tenpoems@juno.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1



MY LIFE
by Billy Collins



Sometimes I see it as a straight line

drawn with a pencil and a ruler

transecting the circle of the world



or as a finger piercing

a smoke ring, casual, inquisitive,



but then the sun will come out

or the phone will ring

and I will cease to wonder



if it is one thing,

a large ball of air and memory,

or many things,

a string of small farming towns,

a dark road winding through them.



Let us say it is a field

I have been hoeing every day,

hoeing and singing,

then going to sleep in one of its furrows,



or now that it is more than half over,

a partially open door,

rain dripping from the eaves.



Like yours, it could be anything,

a nest with one egg,

a hallway that leads to a thousand rooms--

whatever happens to float into view

when I close my eyes



or look out a window

for more than a few minutes,

so that some days I think

it must be everything and nothing at once.



But this morning, sitting up in bed,

wearing my black sweater and my glasses,

the curtains drawn and the windows up,





I am a lake, my poem is an empty boat,

and my life is the breeze that blows

through the whole scene



stirring everything it touches--

the surface of the water, the limp sail,

even the heavy, leafy trees along the shore.



Life Is a Breeze



How does he do this? I mean, write about trifles, the little moments of any ordinary day, a wry, half-smile flickering all the way through the poem, and yet at the same time manage to address something wonderful? Something, well, something that brings a deeper breath to your lungs, or that catches you off guard and takes a weight from your heart? Practically any one of his poems can stir something in you before your mind can quite decipher what it is that has affected you so. This, of course, is one of the hallmarks of great poetry. It was Wallace Stevens who once said that "poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully."1

Billy Collins is a recent poet laureate of the United States, and the most widely read poet in America today. The deceptive simplicity of his work, I think, must be one of the reasons for his success, which is far greater than any other American poet since the time of Robert Frost, who was also a "poet of the people." Collins is a poet of the vernacular, of everyday speech and things, yet with a twist. His work seems so simple, so transparently obvious in its everyday concerns, that it would seem to have no interest in resisting anyone's intelligence, not even "almost." Yet it can deliver a side blow that can have you either bent double with laughter, wincing at a truth you may know but not have especially wanted to name--



The name of the author is the first to go



he says, with ironic self-deprecation, in the first line of the poem "Forgetfulness"--or gasping a little for air at the sheer vision he has opened up in a single phrase or a line. And there can be times when he manages, astoundingly, to achieve all these effects at the same time.

This poem, "My Life," winds me effortlessly between its banks like a river from beginning to end, no hard knocks, no rapids, all flow and ease; yet by the time I come out at the other end something has happened; I feel different, and I don't quite know why.

All the images are from the daily round, and since he is describing his life, that may seem natural enough. But would you see your life



. . . as a straight line

drawn with a pencil and a ruler

transecting the circle of the world?



So matter of fact, so deliberate and precise? So . . . geometrical? It is almost as if someone sat down and drew up a life in much the same way as you dissect a triangle. There is something so cleanly dispassionate about this image, and this is just the quality that Collins carries through so much of his work. As if he were floating slightly above the scene he is describing; or as if he were always at a certain distance from himself, noting with a certain humor the foibles and little daily rituals that fill out the texture of his life.

Distance does not necessarily imply a disconnection. On the contrary, it can give a perspective that fosters a kind of warmth, a fondness for what is being observed. And it is distance, too, that can allow us to see the humorous side of things, especially when it comes to ourselves. It was Czeslaw Milosz who said, in his poem "Love" that



Love means to look at yourself

The way one looks at distant things3



Milosz goes on in the same poem to say that it is distance that allows us to realize we are only one thing among many, and that when we see life that way, our heart is healed of ills we may not even have known we were suffering from.

So here is Billy Collins, inspecting his life, and for a moment he sees it



. . . as a finger piercing

a smoke ring, casual, inquisitive,



It's something of a game, blowing smoke rings, and even more of a game to try and pass your finger through it. Life can seem like that, Collins tells us; and again, whoever would have thought of such an image to describe a life?

Collins always seems to manage to come at the familiar from an odd angle, and the very oddity is awakening, somehow. I feel my life in a new way when taking in this image, even if I can't quite articulate what the newness is. The events, the stuff of life, are as evanescent as smoke, it suggests; and my passage through this hall of mirrors is all curiosity and wondering. Pause for a moment and consider this image for yourself, the feeling or the sensation it arouses in you, the associations it evokes from your own life's journey.

And as if to make his point, the whole image disappears in a ray of sunshine, just as the cards in a magician's hand disappear up his sleeve, and we are back in Collins's day, in which, for a moment, the sun has come out, or the phone has rung. Excuse me for a moment, let this poem look after itself for the foreseeable future, while I answer the phone, or at least contemplate its ringing tone.

Except that, when it comes to poem-making, the telephone is as fair game in Collins's mind as a smoke ring is. Anything, anything at all, is likely to work its way into one of his poems, since anything and everything is equally a part of our living world. This is it, you see, he seems to be saying. Don't think poetry and the poetic image must always come on wings from some other, transcendent world; or from deep deep down in the archeology of our unconscious. No, the visible world of pens and rulers and telephones also comes tinged with an uncommon light, should we wish to see it that way. And Collins does.

So is it one thing, or many things, your life--



a large ball of air and memory,



perhaps? Here he is again, edging the familiar right up to the strange. Well, isn't it strange, to think of your life as a ball of air and memory? Strange, and perhaps disconcerting somehow? When we are very old, perhaps it is only our memories that keep us alive; that, and air--pure, thin air. But then again, his life (and ours, by implication) might equally be



a string of small farming towns,

a dark road winding through them.



How comforting, to think of a life this way, a series of settled communities with established traditions, all tilling the earth and sowing seeds, everything connected, given continuity, by a winding road. That the road is dark we probably take for granted, for who can expect to see where that road leads? Stanley Kunitz, the oldest poet still at work in the Western world, offers a somewhat similar image of warmth and continuity when he describes his own long life in the poem "The Layers." He speaks of the milestones receding in the distance toward the horizon,



and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,



Collins goes on to add another farming image, comparing his life to a field he has been hoeing, one in whose furrows he curls up to sleep in, which reminds me that we all make a bed of our lives to lie in. That good old farming wisdom, reaping what we sow. So many of Collins's poems let loose a cascade of images, one after the other sailing by, as if to say, if that one doesn't fit, then try this one? And so it is here, where he says of his life,



Like yours, it could be anything,

.....................

so that some days I think

it must be everything and nothing at once.



And right there, in those last couple of lines, you might think him whimsical; or, instead, approaching the insight of some old Buddhist sage; or both, all at the same time. Because isn't that what the deepest wisdom is like--

so simple, almost offhand, that it might pass right over your shoulder without you catching even the scent of it?

But let's not stray too far from the concrete and the quotidian: that would never do in a Billy Collins poem. So here we are, finally, this very morning, and Collins is



. . . sitting up in bed,

wearing my black sweater and my glasses,

the curtains drawn and the windows up,



and he paints one last, beautiful picture that manages to bring together all in one scene both the physicality and the ineffability of the life that we live. He returns us to the timeless metaphor of life as breath, as wind--ruach, the Hebrews called it, breath-as-spirit--and it is this that pushes his poem along, and that stirs into life everything that is. This is the genius of Billy Collins, that he can lead us seamlessly from his black sweater and his glasses to the l...

Customer Reviews

So good, I read it twice!
Roger Housden uses a unique format: he chose 11 superb poems, and followed each by his own commentary and fascinating anecdotes. In addition to offering works by famous poets, such as Billy Collins, John Keats, and Mary Oliver, he introduces readers to the marvelous poetry of relatively obscure modern poets. Dorianne Laux once thought of taking her own life but was kept alive by the kindness of strangers: "A woman holds the glass door open, waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.... a retarded child who lifts his almond eyes and smiles. Somehow they always find me, seem even to be waiting..." And then there is Naomi Shihab Nye stating, "Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time."

What could be truer than that?

Each poem is a small but mighty message in this power-packed 185-page little volume that deserves a place on your bedside table, or to be read, like the great now-deceased James Wright's poem, in a hammock where "the cowbells follow one another into the distances of the afternoon."

A Wonderful Introduction to Poets and Their Poems
I have read every poetry book Roger Housden has written and I owe him a huge debt of gratitude. He has introduced me to poets I would never have met and now just love. Unfortunately, usually the only poetry books one finds on the shelves are the tried and true. He has some of those sprinkled in, but he also has some you will never know about unless you read his books.

His commentary is very personal and enlightening. If I have any negative criticism, it is that he sometimes belabors his personal life a bit too much. But be patient, he'll forge on and once caught in the poetry, leaves the personal behind.

I have written to him to ask him to please continue to write these books. I believe he has set a limit of six poetry books. Not nearly enough!! More!! More!!

Poem for Page 102
I was at first giddy at the reading of this on my evening walks
stepping lightly over each word until the streetlamps weren't
enough. Then I hit page 102 in the darkness and stopped as
it hurt to finish. Poetry to me is a friend, as it is I'm sure to this
platinum tongued author. But when religions are tackled, compared
and bent with stark preferences it shuns the other ends,
the other strands of belief like a flag untended years in the wind. My
religion might have a hint of a devil and good and bad apples, but
it has always been my friend, and yes, I am a woman.
I suppose each book has its worm, and I found it embroidering its
hungry politics on page 102 of this otherwise very fine linen.