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Ten Poems for Difficult Times by Roger Housden: book review


 

Ten Poems for Difficult Times (2018) is a narrative about ten beautiful poems to give readers hope. 

 

Housden says that poetry can help in dark and difficult times because poems are short and get straight to the deepest of human emotions in a powerful way. He says poetry is ‘profoundly necessary’ in difficult times. It ‘rescues the world from oblivion by the practice of attention’ and also ‘revitalizes our imagination.’

 

The poems in this collection are indeed emotive. As Housden says, instead of saying ‘I feel sick’ Robert Lowell’s poem says, ‘I hear my ill spirit sob in each blood cell.’

 

With each of the ten poems, there is an introductory passage which explains the rationale for its selection, sets the scene, brings in connections to other poets, and analyses its power. 

 

The poets in this collection include: Conrad Aiken, Ellen Bass, Wendell Berry, Jack Gilbert, Nazim Hikmet, Mary Howe, WS Merwin, Jan Richardson, Maggie Smith, and William Stafford. 

 

They are strong, carefully-selected poems that have the ability to ‘turn grief to grit, anger to action, and pain to perseverance.’ They present the bad with the good, which is shown in Maggie Smith’s 2015 poem Good Bones: ‘For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.’ She then describes our responsibility to the next generation – how to prepare them for an unkind world – and ends with a message to future children: ‘You could make this place beautiful.’ 

 

My favourite is Jan Richardson’s 2015 poem How the Light Comes. It is timely because its sub-title is ‘A Blessing for Christmas’ – but its sentiments are timeless. She is an ordained Methodist minister but this poem transcends all religions and none. Housden adds his analysis: ‘Only when we drop the struggle – to be the captain of our own ship, to run our life as we see fit – only then may another way open before us, one whose existence we may never have suspected. Perhaps then we shall see that all along we have been a lamp that has been unaware of its own light.’

 

This book was written before the Coronavirus pandemic and is relevant as much now as ever before. 


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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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