Poems That Make Grown Women Cry

Anthony Holden, Ben Holden

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781501121876
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The internationally bestselling collection of poetry so powerful that it has moved readers to tears. "Anthony and Ben Holden remind us that you don't have to be an academic or a postgraduate in creative writing to be moved by verse" ( The Wall Street Journal ). One hundred women—distinguished in literature and film, science and law, theater and human rights—share poems that have stayed with them long after reading. The poems here range from the eighth century to today, from Rumi and Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, W.H. Auden to Carol Ann Duffy, Pablo Neruda, and Derek Walcott to Imtiaz Dharker and Warsan Shire. Their themes range from love and loss, through mortality and mystery, war and peace, to the beauty and variety of nature. From Yoko Ono to Judi Dench, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Elena Ferrante, Tina Brown, Michelle Williams, and Sarah Waters to Kaui Hart Hemmings and Joan Baez to Nikki Giovanni, this unique collection delivers private insights into the minds of women whose writing, acting, and thinking are admired around the world. Their selections include classics by visionaries, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Pablo Neruda as well as contemporary works by masters, including Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Warsan Shire, with introductions to their work as powerful as the poems themselves. Poems That Make Grown Women Cry is a collection which represents a variety of aesthetic sensibilities and the full spectrum of human emotion. It is also a reminder of how poetry can touch minds and hearts, and how easily it will do so for readers of all stripes if they turn the first page.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Prefaces by Anthony Holden and Ben Holden
• ‘Donal Og’ by Anonymous
• ‘Isn’t That Something?’ by Rumi
• ‘Bani Adam’ by Sa’adi
• ‘The Angels at the Tavern Door’ by Hafiz
• ‘Grief fills the room up’ from ‘King John’ by William Shakespeare
• Extract from ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ by John Webster
• ‘On My First Son’ by Ben Jonson
• ‘Clerk Saunders’ by Anonymous
• ‘Frost at Midnight’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• ‘I loved the Boy . . .’ by William Wordsworth
• ‘So, we’ll go no more a roving’ by Lord Byron
• ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by John Keats
• Extract from ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley
• ‘Ulysses’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• ‘Abou Ben Adhem’ by Leigh Hunt
• ‘I Am’ by John Clare
• ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese: XXVIII’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth’ by Arthur Hugh Clough
• ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• ‘Facing West from California’s Shores’ by Walt Whitman
• ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes – ’ by Emily Dickinson
• ‘I took my Power in my Hand’ by Emily Dickinson
• ‘The World – feels Dusty’ by Emily Dickinson
• ‘The Walrus and The Carpenter’ by Lewis Carroll
• ‘Life is but a Dream’ by Lewis Carroll
• ‘When You are Old’ by W. B. Yeats
• ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ by W. B. Yeats
• ‘To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train’ by Frances Cornford
• ‘Tenebris Interlucentem’ by James Elroy Flecker
• ‘Listen!’ by Else Lasker-Schüler and ‘No Solace Here’ by Gottfried Benn
• ‘Adlestrop’ by Edward Thomas
• ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T. S. Eliot
• ‘Papyrus’ by Ezra Pound
• ‘Fallen’ by Alice Corbin
• ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by Wilfred Owen
• ‘Suicide in the Trenches’ by Siegfried Sassoon
• ‘Does It Matter?’ by Siegfried Sassoon
• ‘Strange Meeting’ by Wilfred Owen
• ‘Medusa’ by Louise Bogan
• ‘Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter’ by John Crowe Ransom
• ‘I Explain A Few Things’ by Pablo Neruda
• ‘Hurt Hawks’ by Robinson Jeffers
• ‘Funeral Blues’ by W. H. Auden
• ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ by W. H. Auden
• ‘Requiem’ by Anna Akhmatova
• Excerpt from ‘Four Quartets:’ ‘No 4. Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot
• ‘The Peasants’ by Alun Lewis
• Excerpt from ‘The Lost Son:’ 5. ‘It was beginning winter’ by Theodore Roethke
• ‘If You Forget Me’ by Pablo Neruda
• ‘Timothy Winters’ by Charles Causley
• ‘Sestina’ by Elizabeth Bishop
• ‘Of Mere Being’ by Wallace Stevens
• ‘Waking in the Blue’ by Robert Lowell
• ‘Edge’ by Sylvia Plath
• ‘Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward’ by Anne Sexton
• ‘The Bean Eaters’ by Gwendolyn Brooks
• Extract from ‘Let Us Believe in the Beginning of a Cold Season’ by Forugh Farrokhzad
• ‘Those Winter Sundays’ by Robert Hayden
• ‘Dublinesque’ by Philip Larkin
• ‘Walls’ by Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali
• ‘Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight’ by Galway Kinnell
• ‘Diving into the Wreck’ by Adrienne Rich
• ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop
• ‘Verses from My Room’ by Susanna Tomalin
• ‘Sonny’s Lettah (Anti-Sus Poem)’ by Linton Kwesi Johnson
• ‘Grow Old With Me’ by John Lennon
• Extract from ‘Ten Cheremiss (Mari) Songs’ by Anselm Hollo
• ‘The Kaleidoscope’ by Douglas Dunn
• ‘On Squaw Peak’ by Robert Hass
• ‘Perfection Wasted’ by John Updike
• ‘Clearances’ by Seamus Heaney
• ‘Nullipara’ by Sharon Olds
• ‘When Death Comes’ by Mary Oliver
• ‘Late Fragment’ by Raymond Carver
• ‘Minority’ by Imtiaz Dharker
• ‘Michael’s Dream’ (from ‘Atlantis’) by Mark Doty
• ‘Daylight Robbery’ by Paul Henry
• ‘Epiphany’ (from ‘Birthday Letters’) by Ted Hughes
• ‘I Am Selling My Daughter for 100 Won’ by Jang Jin-sung
• Extracts from ‘Battalion 101’ by Micheal O’Siadhail
• ‘The Last Part’ by Deborah Keily
• ‘Our Neighbours’ by Felix Dennis
• ‘Revenge’ by Taha Muhammad Ali
• ‘To A’ by Harold Pinter
• ‘Road Signs’ by Caroline Bird
• ‘Small Comfort’ by Katha Pollitt
• ‘Home’ by Warsan Shire
• ‘for women who are difficult to love’ by Warsan Shire
• ‘Sixty Years After’ by Derek Walcott
• ‘John, this is the sea’ (from ‘Something Like the Sea’) by Philip Gross
• ‘The Ballad of True Regret’ by Sebastian Barker
• ‘This Skin That Carry My Worth’ by Earl Mills
• ‘An Unseen’ by Carol Ann Duffy
• ‘City Horse’ by Henri Cole
• ‘Vigil’ by Jeremy Robson
• ‘Sentenced to Life’ by Clive James
• Afterword by Sebastian Faulks
• Amnesty International: ‘Why Amnesty thinks this book is important’ by Nicky Parker
• Acknowledgements
• About Anthony and Ben Holden
• Index of Contributors and Poets
• Index of Titles of Poems
• Index of First Lines
• Credits, Copyrights and Permissions
• Copyright