Ten Poems to Open Your Heart

Ten Poems to Open Your Heart is a book devoted to love: to the intimacy of personal love and lovemaking, to a loving compassion for others, and to the love that embraces both this world and the next. This new volume from Roger Housden features a few of the same poets as his extraordinarily moving Ten Poems to Change Your Life, such as Mary Oliver and Pablo Neruda, along with contributions from Sharon Olds, Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz, Denise Levertov, and others. Any one of the ten poems and, indeed, any one of Housden’s reflections on them, can open, gladden, or pierce your heart.

Through the voices of these ten inspiring poets, and through illustrations from his own life, Housden expresses the tenderness, beauty, joys, and sorrows of love, the presence of which, more than anything else, gives human existence its meaning.

As Housden says in his eloquent introduction, “Great poetry happens when the mind is looking the other way and words fall from the sky to shape a moment that would normally be untranslatable. . . . When the heart opens, we forget ourselves and the world pours in: this world, and also the invisible world of meaning that sustains everything that was and ever shall be.”

Roger Housden, a native of Bath, England, emigrated to the United States in 1998. He now lives in Woodstock, New York, with his wife, Maria. He is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Ten Poems to Change Your Life, and also a recent novella, Chasing Rumi: A Fable About Finding the Heart’s True Desire. He gives occasional public recitals of ecstatic poetry from the world’s great literary and spiritual traditions. You can e-mail him at tenpoems@juno.com.