Life Support: 100 Poems to Reach for on Dark Nights Edited by Julia Copus

These carefully selected poems offer solace and provide an escape from the constant chatter of everyday thought. They will help make space for the unexpected and enable us to reinvent ourselves within the chaotic landscape of our lives. Some will be old favourites, others less well-known. All the poems will have the power to surprise or move.

A deeper, more lasting comfort comes from art that makes us sit up and listen, that reawakens the senses and offers new ways of looking – this is poetry that, in the best sense, unsettles us, in order to reconnect us with the world around us and bring us to a place of greater clarity.

The anthology will be divided into the following sections: The deep heart’s core (poems about places of sanctuary); As a boy I stood before it for hours (poems that remind us to place our focus ‘out there’; that show us how to be mindful); A world in a grain of sand (poems that play with the notion of scale, so that the tiny becomes large and the large tiny – putting things in perspective); Still life (poems about focusing on a specific moment); and Another Self (poems on friendship/companionship; a sense of everyone being in the same boat).

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