This wide-ranging selection combines popular choices of traditional
poems read at funerals with powerful poems by contemporary writers
more tuned to our present age of doubt and disbelief. There are poems
here for churchgoers and believers, including classic verses of grief
and consolation by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte and
Emily Dickinson, the anonymous Do not stand at my grave and weep, and
the poems read at Princess Diana's funeral. But there are also poems
for people of all faiths and religions, for agnosti and atheists, and
most importantly for those who aren't sure what they believe, whose
grief over loss is the more intense for not knowing what happens to
the soul after death. Grief isn't denied but experienced and made more
bearable by being put into memorable words. Searing poems of lament
are followed by moving elegies celebrating the lives of those we will
always love. Whether and how the spirit survives is then explored in
an extraordinary gathering of poems by writers as different and
diverse as the Persian mystic Rumi, Zen Buddhist composers of Japanese
haiku, and American poets Mary Oliver and Jane Kenyon. Buttressed
against their assertions of faith in an afterlife are modern scepti,
from Auden and Larkin to William Carlos Williams and C.K. Williams,
whose wrestling with the meaning of death helps us make sense of no
sense, mirroring our own anxieties and difficulties. But however
various and contradictory these poems, their message chimes with
Larkin's famous words, proving 'Our almost-instinct almost true:/ What
will survive of us is love.' Unlike other poetry anthologies of loss,
mourning and remembrance, Do Not Go Gentle offers a selection of poems
specifically for reading at funerals and memorial services. It can
also be used for reading aloud to friends and family, or for reading
while numbed and bewildered -all times when the right poem can help us
share and bear the burden of immediate grief.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781780370293
Publisert
2016
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloodaxe Books
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter