{"product_id":"poems-of-healing-isbn-9781101908259","title":"Poems of Healing","description":"\u003cb\u003eA remarkable Pocket Poets anthology of poems from around the world and across the centuries about illness and healing, both physical and spiritual.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom ancient Greece and Rome up to the present moment, poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. \u003ci\u003ePoems of Healing\u003c\/i\u003e gathers a treasury of such poems, tracing the many possible journeys of physical and spiritual illness, injury, and recovery, from John Donne’s “Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse” and Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged moments” to Eavan Boland’s “Anorexic,” from W.H. Auden’s “Miss Gee” to Lucille Clifton’s “Cancer,” and from D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” to Rafael Campo’s “Antidote” and Seamus Heaney’s “Miracle.” Here are poems from around the world, by Sappho, Milton, Baudelaire, Longfellow, Cavafy, and Omar Khayyam; by Stevens, Lowell, and Plath; by Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Bogan, Yehuda Amichai, Mark Strand, and Natalia Toledo. Messages of hope in the midst of pain—in such moving poems as Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” George Herbert’s “The Flower,” Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” and Stevie Smith’s “Away, Melancholy”—make this the perfect gift to accompany anyone on a journey of healing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEveryman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. \u003ci\u003eForeword \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eQUINTUS SERENUS SAMMONICUS “Abracadabra”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTHE ILLNESS\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e C. K. WILLIAMS Really \u003cbr\u003e EMILY DICKINSON “The Soul has Bandaged moments –”\u003cbr\u003e MARK STRAND “The sickness of angels is nothing new\u003cbr\u003e ANNE FINCH The Spleen \u003cbr\u003e CHARLES BAUDELAIRE Spleen (IV) \u003cbr\u003e WILLIAM COWPER Lines Written During a Period of Insanity\u003cbr\u003e SPENCER REECE \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eHartford \u003cbr\u003e CAROL ANN DUFFY The Virgin’s Memo\u003cbr\u003e DOUGLAS DUNN \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eDisenchantments \u003cbr\u003e D. A. POWELL “they hear the clapping of the bell and are afraid” \u003cbr\u003e GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eThe Light Gray Soil \u003cbr\u003e KAY RYAN Among English Verbs \u003cbr\u003e ROBERT PINSKY Dying \u003cbr\u003e EAVAN BOLAND Anorexic \u003cbr\u003e GWYNETH LEWIS “Talk With a Headache”\u003cbr\u003e SAPPHO TWO TRANSLATIONS (Fragment 31) \u003cbr\u003e THOM GUNN The Man With Night Sweats \u003cbr\u003e C. P. CAVAFY The Funeral of Sarpedon \u003cbr\u003e KEITH DOUGLAS John Anderson\u003cbr\u003e DAVID CONSTANTINE Pity\u003cbr\u003e MAY SWENSON Staring at the Sea on the Day of the Death of Another\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTHE DIAGNOSIS\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA Clothes \u003cbr\u003e W. H. AUDEN Miss Gee \u003cbr\u003e WILLIAM LOGAN Little Compton \u003cbr\u003e ALISSA VALLES Decision Tree\u003cbr\u003e RAFAEL CAMPO Antidote \u003cbr\u003e GAVIN EWART Sonnet: Intermittent Claudication \u003cbr\u003e JANE KENYON Prognosis \u003cbr\u003e LUCILLE CLIFTON Cancer \u003cbr\u003e LUCILLE CLIFTON 1994\u003cbr\u003e C. K. WILLIAMS Diagnosis \u003cbr\u003e NICOLE SEALEY medical history\u003cbr\u003e J. D. MCCLATCHY My Mammogram \u003cbr\u003e ADRIENNE RICH Power\u003cbr\u003e TOM PAULIN Under the Eyes \u003cbr\u003e JULIA ALVAREZ “Are we all ill with acute loneliness” \u003cbr\u003e EMILY DICKINSON “A \u003ci\u003eWounded \u003c\/i\u003eDeer – leaps highest–” \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTHE REMEDY\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ROBERT PINSKY ABC \u003cbr\u003e VASKO POPA Before the Game \u003cbr\u003e VASKO POPA After the Game \u003cbr\u003e MASAOKA SHIKI Eight Haiku \u003cbr\u003e ZBIGNIEW HERBERT Breviary \u003cbr\u003e MARCELLUS EMPIRICUS \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eDe Medicamentis \u003cbr\u003e JANE KENYON \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eHaving It Out With Melancholy\u003cbr\u003e C. P. CAVAFY Melancholy of Jason Kleander, Poet in Kommagini, AD 595\u003cbr\u003e NATALIA TOLEDO The Flower That Drops Its Petals \u003cbr\u003e MIROSLAV HOLUB “Although a poem arises . . .’ \u003cbr\u003e MIROSLAV HOLUB “Although a poem is . . .” \u003cbr\u003e ADRIENNE RICH Calibrations \u003cbr\u003e GREG DELANTY The Green Room\u003cbr\u003e MARK STRAND “When after a long silence one picks up the pen” \u003cbr\u003e LOUISE GLUCK A Slip of Paper\u003cbr\u003e C. P. CAVAFY Kleitos’ Illness \u003cbr\u003e JOHN DONNE Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse\u003cbr\u003e D. H. LAWRENCE \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eThe Ship of Death\u003cbr\u003e ADA LIMON The Raincoat \u003cbr\u003e MARY JO SALTER Hot Water Bottle \u003cbr\u003e LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU A Receipt to Cure the Vapors \u003cbr\u003e KARL KIRCHWEY Blood and Light \u003cbr\u003e ALISSA VALLES Pain Fellow\u003cbr\u003e RAFAEL CAMPO \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003ePhone Messages on Call \u003cbr\u003e KATE DANIELS Support Group\u003cbr\u003e AIMEE GRUNBERGER Chemotherapy \u003cbr\u003e J. D. MCCLATCHY \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eRadiation Days \u003cbr\u003e MAX RITVO Poem To My Litter\u003cbr\u003e JOHN DOWLAND Come, Heavy Sleep \u003cbr\u003e DONALD HALL Deathwork \u003cbr\u003e OMAR KHAYYAM \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eThe Ruba’iyat \u003cbr\u003e CHARLES BAUDELAIRE Invitation to the Voyage \u003cbr\u003e MARGARET ATWOOD Up \u003cbr\u003e STEVIE SMITH Away, Melancholy \u003cbr\u003e GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS “My own heart let me more have pity on” \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTHE HEALING\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e LUCILLE CLIFTON blessing the boats \u003cbr\u003e ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI Try to Praise the Mutilated World \u003cbr\u003e WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA The End and the Beginning \u003cbr\u003e RUDAKI On the Death of the Amir’s Father\u003cbr\u003e WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Song: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” \u003cbr\u003e DYLAN THOMAS A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London \u003cbr\u003e EAVAN BOLAND Quarantine\u003cbr\u003e ADRIENNE RICH From a Survivor\u003cbr\u003e ROSANNA WARREN For Chiara \u003cbr\u003e DEBORA GREGER Black Silk \u003cbr\u003e SEAMUS HEANEY Miracle \u003cbr\u003e CHARLOTTE MEW On the Asylum Road\u003cbr\u003e LOUISE BOGAN Evening in the Sanitarium\u003cbr\u003e SYLVIA PLATH Tulips \u003cbr\u003e ROBERT LOWELL Home After Three Months Away \u003cbr\u003e EMILY DICKINSON “After great pain, a formal feeling comes–” \u003cbr\u003e HENRI COLE Morning Glory \u003cbr\u003e GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS Carrion Comfort \u003cbr\u003e ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eIn Memoriam \u003cbr\u003e EMILY DICKINSON “They say that ‘Time assuages’–” \u003cbr\u003e KAY RYAN Retroactive \u003cbr\u003e GWENDOLYN BROOKS when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story\u003cbr\u003e CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ Mittelbergheim \u003cbr\u003e EMILY BRONTE My Lady’s Grave\u003cbr\u003e CHRISTINA ROSSETTI Remember \u003cbr\u003e JOHN MILTON Methought I saw \u003cbr\u003e RICHARD WILBUR The House \u003cbr\u003e HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW The Cross of Snow \u003cbr\u003e VICTOR HUGO “Tomorrow as soon as the countryside pales with dawn” \u003cbr\u003e DOUGLAS DUNN The Kaleidoscope \u003cbr\u003e TONY HARRISON \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eLong Distance \u003cbr\u003e GRACE SCHULMAN Celebration \u003cbr\u003e JAMES MERRILL Farewell Performance \u003cbr\u003e WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA Cat in an Empty Apartment \u003cbr\u003e W. H. AUDEN Talking to Myself \u003cbr\u003e THOM GUNN The Wound \u003cbr\u003e TOBIAS KIRCHWEY To My Dissector \u003cbr\u003e JANE KENYON Notes from the Other Side \u003cbr\u003e DON PATERSON The Lover\u003cbr\u003e MIROSLAV HOLUB Crush Syndrome \u003cbr\u003e YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA Facing It \u003cbr\u003e SEAMUS HEANEY Chorus from \u003ci\u003eThe Cure at Troy \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e KATE DANIELS Molecules \u003cbr\u003e ABBA KOVNER He Stood There \u003cbr\u003e ALISSA VALLES Discharge \u003cbr\u003e DANEZ SMITH little prayer \u003cbr\u003e GEORGE HERBERT The Flower \u003cbr\u003e LES MURRAY Spring \u003cbr\u003e WALLACE STEVENS The Sun This March\u003cbr\u003e DEREK MAHON Everything Is Going To Be All Right\u003cbr\u003e YEHUDA AMICHAI The Amen Stone \u003cbr\u003e H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) “O Heart, small urn” \u003cbr\u003e CHARLOTTE MEW Not for that City \u003cbr\u003e GWENDOLYN BROOKS \u003ci\u003eFrom \u003c\/i\u003eThe Second Sermon on the WarplandKARL KIRCHWEY is an award-winning American poet, book reviewer, creative writing teacher, translator, arts administrator, and literary curator. He has been a director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, directed the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College, served as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome, and is currently a professor and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Boston University.FOREWORD\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e“De profundis clamavi,” \u003c\/i\u003egoes the first verse of Psalm 130, “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.” Healing is not a final state; it is not an end. It is, instead, a process. Sometimes it begins in those depths, whether they are physical, mental, or spiritual, and moves toward recovery. Healing takes time: and from this point of view, it would seem to be uniquely unsuited to our moment, which is habituated to reaction, rapid absorption and constant change. Healing does not work this way. It shares with poetry the need for participation in a process, if it is to provide a true cure, a lasting relief. Nor does merely \u003ci\u003edeclaring \u003c\/i\u003ea cure necessarily make that cure effective, because poetry works by means of laws as mysterious and yet irrefutable as those of science. In poetry there is the genuine cry and the feigned one, just as in medicine there is the genuine cure and the snake oil, and it is helpful to know the difference between them. As the poet, critic and translator Richard Howard observed long ago in another context, poetry is not a lotion or ointment to be slathered on the outside; it is an inner treatment.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e I wrote the preceding paragraph in December 2019, having started to gather the poems for this anthology a year before that. Like everyone else in the age of the internet, I was simultaneously connected and disconnected, knowing and clueless, and was only peripherally aware of what had been happening in Wuhan, China. I had no idea that within three months, the Coronavirus pandemic would begin to infect millions, kill hundreds of thousands, and cause worldwide economic devastation.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e My primary care physician is also a scholar of the Vedas. Suffering from what I learned was labyrinthitis, an infection of the inner ear causing vertigo, I asked him why dizziness often results in a feeling of intense nausea. He looked at me and smiled and said, “Medicine is not very good at answering the question \u003ci\u003eWhy.\u003c\/i\u003e” I was surprised at this response, from one as wise as he. I thought doctors were scientists. I thought answering the question \u003ci\u003eWhy? \u003c\/i\u003ewas the essence of any medical diagnosis. But maybe this is partly a matter of focus. In her memoir \u003ci\u003eBody of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab\u003c\/i\u003e, Christine Montross writes, “At times, in fact at most times, specific knowledge in medicine seems to be better understood than general knowledge.” Poets, on the other hand, sometimes use the specifics of the world around them to arrive at a more general knowledge of what it means to be alive. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e This anthology tracks a process beginning in illness, moving through a diagnosis (whether or not it answers the question \u003ci\u003eWhy?\u003c\/i\u003e) to the identification of a remedy, and the possibility of healing. As the only creatures we know of afflicted with a lifelong knowledge of our own eventual extinction, of course we rejoice in our recovery. That rapture takes its point, however, its texture and its authenticity, from the knowledge of what we have come through. And we are never quite cured of what we know lies ahead.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The earliest poem in this anthology is one by the ancient Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos (and she is describing the symptoms of the sickness called being in love); the most recent, a homey reminiscence by a contemporary poet of a rubber hot water bottle, has not yet appeared in a book. The illnesses catalogued here range from “spleen” to substance abuse, from anorexia to AIDS, from depression and bipolar disorder to cancer. The work gathered under the rubric of \u003ci\u003ePoems of Healing \u003c\/i\u003enecessarily overlaps with poems included in other anthologies: of elegies, for example, or poems chronicling emotional extremes. Poetry has always existed next door to sacred chant and magical incantation, too, and even the echo chamber of our age cannot quite erase the fact that \u003ci\u003ewords have power\u003c\/i\u003e. Some poems even borrow the list form of a successful Rx. In many poems, healing is not comfort and time does not heal all. In these poems healing is, instead, perfected remembering.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle “One Art,” already widely enough anthologized not to require inclusion here, concludes with the mordant lines “It’s evident\/ the art of losing’s not too hard to master,\/ though it may look like (\u003ci\u003eWrite \u003c\/i\u003eit!) like disaster.” Her parenthesis contains both defiance, and a challenge. For the poets included in this anthology are indeed determined to \u003ci\u003ewrite \u003c\/i\u003etheir way out of illness, or if this is not possible, then by means of words to achieve at least a clear perspective on their own mortality. This requires resourcefulness and bravery, and not infrequently, the way out lies through the love of another person or the support of a community. If there is a single ingredient indispensable to the process and the work of healing, these poems suggest that it is love.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e (May 2020)","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302777344229,"sku":"NP9781101908259","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781101908259.jpg?v=1767734911","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/poems-of-healing-isbn-9781101908259","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}