Tell Me the Truth About Life

A National Poetry Day Anthology

,

• Publisher: Michael O'Mara
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789290998
• eBook ISBN: 9781789291223
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

CELEBRATING THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY, THE OFFICIAL NATIONAL POETRY DAY COLLECTION. CURATED AND INTRODUCED BY CERYS MATTHEWS. Tell Me the Truth About Life i s an indispensable anthology which celebrates poetry's power to tap into the truths that matter. Curated and introduced by Cerys Matthews, this collection draws on the wisdom of crowds: featuring poems nominated for their insight into truth by a range of ordinary and extraordinary people: from Britain's first astronaut, Helen Sharman, to sporting heroes and world-famous musicians, teachers, artists and politicians.Their choices include contemporary work by Yrsa Daley-Ward, John Cooper Clarke and Kei Miller alongside classics by W H Auden, Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas. Here you will find poems to revive the spirit, ballads to mobilize and life-lines to hold you safe in the dark.Compiled for National Poetry Day's twenty-fifth anniversary, Tell Me the Truth About Life is a book that reminds us we are never completely alone in our search to glimpse the truth.Containing nominations from a number of high-profile poetry lovers and poets, including Michael Morpurgo, Mark Gatiss, Dolly Alderton, and Helen Sharman, among others.

Chapter 1

‘An Endless Fountain of
Immortal Drink’: Sage Advice

What do people so often hope to find when they turn to poetry? Guidelines, hard-earned wisdom, eternal verities, all the things we wish we’d known ‘way back then’. The poems in this opening section include several that have been tucked into the pocket of someone going on a journey, or shared at those crossroad occasions – graduations, weddings – when the ‘endless fountain of immortal drink’ tends to flow most generously.

Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka’ and Max Ehrmann’s much-loved ‘Desiderata’ are in this category, while Jack Gilbert’s ‘Failing and Flying’ may strike a sadder note, but finds failure and pain is never just failure, nor just pain. Sound counsel, of course, is always much easier to give than to receive, so there’s some terrific, ghostly advice against taking advice, too.

Piet Hein (1905–1996)

Henry Normal (producer, poet, writer) writes: Here is a handful of truth poems by Piet Hein, a Danish resistance leader who wrote short aphoristic rhymes, or ‘grooks’, that turned out to mean a lot more than the Nazis thought when they appeared as graffiti on walls in occupied Copenhagen.

Hein was a brilliant designer, mathematician and scientist, as well as a poet; indeed, he saw absolutely no contradiction between his callings. His grooks have a fine-tuned precision, using rhythm, rhyme, unarguable logic and the fewest possible words to deliver their wisdom.

Thoughts on a Station Platform

It ought to be plain

how little you gain

by getting excited

and vexed.

You’ll always be late

for the previous train,

and always in time

for the next.

Small Things and Great

He that lets

the small things bind him

leaves the great

undone behind him.

Consolation Grook

Losing one glove

is certainly painful,

but nothing

compared to the pain,

of losing one,

throwing away the other,

and finding

the first one again.

The Road to Wisdom

The road to wisdom?

— Well, it’s plain

and simple to express:

Err

and err

and err again

but less

and less

and less.

Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931)

The Prophet (extract)

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked …

Some of you say, ‘Joy is greater than sorrow,’ and others say, ‘Nay, sorrow is the greater.’

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952)

Mary Jean Chan (poet) writes: There’s something so intimate yet expansive about the way in which Naomi Shihab Nye depicts the relationship between kindness and sorrow in this poem.

Kindness

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.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933)

Marina, Lady Marks (historian, writer and philanthropist) writes: This poem (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) represents the journey of life: our constant learning opportunities, our achievements, good and bad moments, pain and overcoming, progress and setbacks ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. ‘An Endless Fountain of Immortal Drink’: Sage Advice
• 2. ‘Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant’: Different Ways of Looking
• 3. ‘The Fight Was Fixed’: No Punches Pulled
• 4. ‘Rise Like Lions’: Ballads to Mobilize
• 5. ‘The Peace of Wild Things’: Nature’s Solace
• 6. ‘What Is Now Will Soon Be Past’: Mortality and the Ticking Clock
• 7. ‘And Every Mile Another Song’: You Have One Life, Live It
• About National Poetry Day
• Acknowledgements
• Credits
• Index of Poets, Titles and First Lines