A Poem for Every Night of the Year

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I stopped reading these every day and couldn't bring myself to come back to it, deciding to dedicate that time towards reading more contemporary poetry collections instead. Former National Poet of Wales, Clarke is one of the best-known names in UK poetry today, as well as one of the most popular poets on the school curriculum. That memory might be too early to pin down to a particular night or event, but might come attached to the gravelly voice of a grandfather, or the soapy smell of an older sister, or the remembered cosy feel of snuggling into the curve of your mother’s arm as she read to you.

I would have rated the book itself 3 stars but for the astounding impact reading a poem a day had on my everyday life. Over the past four decades her work has examined nature, womanhood, art, music, Welsh history – and always with the lyric and imagistic precision by which her poetry is instantly recognisable. And there are poems on certain dates that tell us about the traditions of other cultures and religions.

Each poem is introduced somehow and while sometimes the blurb before the poem is informative and interesting, other times it just talks about weather at the given season - nothing says "I have no ideas anymore" as a small talk about weather so. This lovely book takes you on a journey through history, seasons, tells of festivals and traditions from many different countries, cultures, and religions. The excuse for this intrusion into the world of the poem must be to make the poems easier to understand by younger readers.

This beautiful collection containsa poem for every day of the year from the very best classic and modern poets. My enjoyment of the poems went up and down, but keeping on track with a small amount of poetry every day (or every few days, as worked best for me) was a great exercise. To me, it is the very diversity and organic development of nursery rhymes that make them so irresistible and what I have tried to convey here. A rather nice reading experience with some classic and some new pieces that help the reader progress through a year and that give you something relatively short to read before going to bed every night.Despite my determination last January, I wasn’t actually sure I’d make it to the December poems within the first year of trying. lol* But it was kind of a nice reading experience and definitely a little different from how I usually read so it was absolutely worth it. Moreover, the poems being for specific days of the year meant that the editor drew my attention to some dates that I had either not known at all previously or that had lurked in the background.

There are some trees that mark the individual months but they are b/w and nothing noteworthy (they are also all the same). The quality of the book itself is of a high standard and can see this book being well used and handed down in my own family.

Robert Louis Stevenson sits alongside Langston Hughes; Lewis Caroll with Carol Ann Duffy; AA Milne with David Harmer. One of our Books of the Year 2016 | A Julia Eccleshare Pick of the Month September 2016 A fabulously rich anthology of 366 poems - one for every night of the year as promised in the title. B. Yeats, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, Roald Dahl, Charles Causley, Eleanor Farjeon, Philip Larkin and many more. It seems to me that interpreting the meaning of a poem can vary a bit from reader to reader, and is in essence the “point” of reading any given piece of poetry. The monthly choices are appropriately seasonal: Robert Frost's haunting and elliptical narrative 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' (p.