Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation (Hardcover)

by Roger Housden (Editor) "When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and..." (more)
Key Phrases: Robert Bly, Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Prize (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
Editor Housden is a dab hand at using poetry as a means to spiritual fulfillment (Ten Poems to Change Your Life, 2001; Ten Poems to Open Your Heart [BKL Ja 1 & 15 03]). Now he demonstrates that he really knows poetry in an inspirational anthology sans inspirational chestnuts. Oh, Emily Dickinson is here, but with the hoydenish "Wild Nights." The love Housden encourages includes sex--see the Anna Swir selections and Galway Kinnell's "Rapture"--and the spirituality he fosters is active even at its quietest, when the soul of existence is suddenly apprehended. Given that agenda, Robert Bly is all over the book, as poet and translator (Housden invariably picks the often-arid Bly at his juiciest), and the Sufis Rumi and Hafiz are here: for Housden, ecstasy is a touchstone of true love and spirituality. But so, it seems, is domesticity (see Wendell Berry's "One Faith Is Bondage") and even morality (see T. S. Eliot's "The Dove Descending"). Only once is a note of New Age solipsism struck. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Description
“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” —Mary Oliver

This luminous anthology brings together great poets from around the world whose work transcends culture and time. Their words reach past the outer divisions to the universal currents of love and revelation that move and inspire us all. These poems urge us to wake up and love. They also call on us to relinquish our grip on ideas and opinions that confine us and, instead, to risk moving forward into the life that is truly ours.

In his selection, Roger Housden has placed strong emphasis on contemporary voices such as the American poet laureate Billy Collins and the Nobel Prize–winners Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney, but the collection also includes some timeless echoes of the past in the form of work by masters such as Goethe, Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson.

The tens of thousands of readers of Roger Housden’s “Ten Poems” series will welcome this beautiful harvest of poems that both open the mind and heal the heart.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Harmony; 1 edition (March 18, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400047994
• ISBN-13: 978-1400047994
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #45,195 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Risk everything "and you find your soul.", March 26, 2003

By	G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"Suffering is part of how it is on earth," editor Roger Housden observes in his Introduction to this luminous collection of poems; "it is an inherent part of the fabric of existence. And if we are lucky, it will break our hearts open" (p. xiii). Housden (TEN POEMS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE; TEN POEMS TO OPEN YOUR HEART) knows great poetry. He has drawn the 110 poems collected in this anthology from around the world, and from every era of history. When read together, "they represent a great song of what is possible for us--all the ways in which a life can be fully lived" (p. xv). These poems reveal that if we risk stepping out of the familiar lamentations and the humdrum details of our daily existence, we might just discover "the White Heat" of our soul. "Listen," Mary Oliver challenges us, "are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"

Other poets collected in this outstanding anthology of accessible poetry include America's Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, Nobel Prize winner, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Robert Bly, Rumi, Jane Hirshfield, W. B. Yeats, Galway Kinnell, Wendell Berry, Emily Dickinson, Kabir, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, and William Stafford.

G. Merritt

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars To live is to risk, July 20, 2005

By	G. M. Arnold "Geoff, that is" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

A few days ago I picked up a copy of Roger Housden's anthology Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation. Today I opened it at a random page, and suddenly felt compelled to start reading the poem out loud. It was D. H. Lawrence's Deeper Than Love, and I found myself reading it slowly, lingering over the words, tasting them, feeling their weight on my tongue.

Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy and alone.

The noise of the air conditioner in the kitchen drowned my speech (it's a miserable night, dew point around 75, no central air) which was good: I was only reading for myself. I finished the Lawrence, and opened again at random: Billy Collins' This Much I Do Remember. Not a poem to read out loud, this one, but one to close your eyes and see what the poet had seen:

that I could feel it being painted within me
brushed on the wall of my skull

And of course all of Housden's favourites are here, like old familiar friends: Rumi, Bly, and above all Mary Oliver. What a glorious collection.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Luminous & Inspirational Poetry Anthology, August 8, 2005

By	Jana L. Perskie "ceruleana" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Writer and editor Roger Housden's luminous and inspirational compilation of poetry "Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation," is one of the best anthologies of this type I have read or seen. This is Housden's fourth volume of a series that began with "Ten Poems To Change Your Life."

In "Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation," Housden selected 110 poems from around the world, whose poets' lives and works span the centuries. I frequently open the book at random and never fail to be moved. Housden has written: "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." Carl Sandburg wrote: "Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away." And from Emily Dickenson: "To see the Summer Sky / Is Poetry though never in a Book it lie / True Poems flee." Whatever poetry is, some of the best can be found here.

Included in this volume are: "Poetry" by Pablo Neruda, "On Angels" "Eyes" by Czeslaw Milosz, "Today Like Every Other Day" by Rumi, "That Day" by Denise Levertov, "Milkweed" by James Wright, "My Fiftieth Year" by W. B. Yeats, "Sunset," and "The Swan" by Ranier Marie Rilke, "The Wind One Brilliant Day" by Antonio Machado, "Everything Is Plundered" by Anna Akhmatova, "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" (excerpt) by William Wordsworth, "A Homecoming" by Wendell Berry, "The Third Body" by Robert Bly, "To have without holding" by Marge Piercy, "Deeper Than Love" by D. H. Lawrence, "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry," "Soul At The White Heat" and "Wild Nights" by Emily Dickenson, "I Thank You" by E.E. Cummings, "Postscript" by Seamus Heaney, "The Road Not Taken" Robert Frost.

Roger Housdan is the author of numerous books on cultural and spiritual themes, including the bestselling Ten Poems series.
JANA