Poems of Healing

A beautiful Pocket Poets selection of poems around the world and across the centuries about illness and healing, both physical and spiritual.

From ancient Greece and Rome (Sappho, Marcellus Empiricus) up to the present moment (Eavan Boland's "Quarantine"), poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. This collection gathers a treasury of such poems, tracing the many possible journeys of illness, injury, and recovery, from John Donne's "Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse" and Emily Dickinson's "The Soul has Bandaged moments" to Charles Baudelaire's "Invitation to the Voyage" and from C.K. Williams's "Diagnosis" and J.D. McClatchy's "Radiation Days" to Rafael Campo's "Antidote" and Seamus Heaney's "Miracle." Here are poems from around the world, by Milton, Baudelaire, Tennyson, Rudaki, and Masaoka Shiki, by Auden, Stevens, Lowell, and Plath, by Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Bogan, Yehuda Amichai, Mark Strand, and Natalia Toledo. Messages of hope in the midst of pain--in such masterpieces as Adam Zagajewski's "Try to Praise the Mutilated World," Wislawa Szymborska's "The End and the Beginning," and Stevie Smith's "Away, Melancholy"--make this the perfect gift to accompany anyone on a journey of healing.