Page 23 - May 2018 Magazine

An Excerpt from Ten Poems for Difficult
Times by Roger Housden

In his bestselling Ten Poems series,
author Roger Housden has shown an
uncanny ability to choose and discuss
poems that strike at the core of
readers’ concerns and needs. In this
new volume, ten extraordinary poems,

along with Roger Housden’s incisive
essays, bring heartfelt insight and
broad perspective both to our personal
challenges and to our cultural and
collective malaise. We hope you’ll
enjoy this excerpt from the book.

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Poetry is a concise and elemental
means of expressing the deepest of
human emotions: joy, sorrow, grief,
hope, love, and longing. It connects us
as a people and a community; it
speaks for us in a way few other forms
of writing can do. When I was in the
process of moving to Manhattan in
2001, in the weeks after 9/11, poems
appeared on every available wall in the Couldn’t I go start a project in Africa,
city. Yet even though I was so aware of or at least do some small thing to
poetry’s power, over the next ten prevent climate catastrophe, start
years, while sitting alone in front of my reducing my own carbon footprint, for
computer, finishing up another volume example, and begin a movement to
in my Ten Poems series, I would encourage others to do the same? But
wonder at times whether I was wasting no; I wrote more poetry books,
my time. wondering all the while whether they

and I were doing little more than
After all, the world is in trouble. It has
always been in trouble. Not only that, making ourselves progressively
but we are often in trouble personally, irrelevant.
too. Surely there must be something I knew better, which is why I kept
more useful, more pressing, to give my writing. I knew that great poetry has
time to than reflecting on poetry? the power to start a fire in a person’s

Bliss Planet 23