The Book of Life

The best poetry is a form of spiritual autobiography - poems that stand as way-markers along a poet's soul journey. Such poems tend to narrate a particular life- experience, but somehow in their telling they touch the soul of the reader. They remind us not so much of a shared experience but rather a shared knowing. They resonate with a mood or tone within ourselves that we instantly recognise as true.

Such potent writing is a rare thing, but the poems gathered here [drawn from the extensive range of Dedalus Press books in print] are such poems - way-markers and turning points along the journey of our becoming. Each one captures an important rite of passage, or the closure or beginning of a personal epoch. Though the experience may be unique to its author, the poems resonate with a far wider sense of soul knowledge ... It is not the voice of one particular poet that we come away with, but rather the collective voice of our shared humanity.