Readings, Prosaic and Poetic

edited by Robin Bloor & Paula Schmidt

Food For The Heart And Mind

Collected over many years, this thoughtfully curated treasury of readings reaches out across multiple cultures and traditions. Open it on almost any page and you will find something to inspire you. It is awash with masterpieces of the writer’s craft.

This literary gem is artfully organized under twelve headings which is itself a poem of a kind, and reads as follows:

At First, An Arousing
Secondly, A Gathering
Third, An Exploration

The Fourth Is A Procession
The Fifth, A Pondering
The Sixth, A Sallying Forth

The Seventh Is A Peregrination
The Eighth Entails A Mission
The Ninth Becomes A Quest

Then Proceeds A Pilgrimage
Penultimately, A Returning
And Finally, A Recurrence

Each of these lines refers to a chapter containing nine separate works of poetry or prose, each occupying just a few pages.

So it comprises 108 readings, harvested from the works of literary giants. A few you will undoubtedly be familiar with, but some will be entirely new to the reader. The book includes three previously unpublished poems by Rina Hands, as well as a few other previously unpublished works. It includes poetry or prose from:

Lao Tzu, The Dalai Lama, G Gurdjieff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jalal ad-Dīn Rumi, Arthur Schopenhauer, Walt Whitman, St Francis, Avicenna, Alexander Pushkin, Honoré de Balzac, John Milton, Marcus Aurelius, St Paul, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Blake, Khalil Gibran, Arthur Rimbaud, John Bunyan, Red Hawk, Immanual Joseph, John Keats, René Daumal, Li Po, William Shakespeare, The Bible, Federico Garcia Lorca, Edgar Allan Poe, Tacitus, Lewis Carroll, Soren Kirkegaard, Farid ud-Din Attar, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Chuang Tzu, Omar Khayyam, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ivan Turgenev, W B Yeats, Charles Causley, Emily Dickinson and many others.

It is a book you will dip into again and again, a book for the coffee table, not the bookshelf.

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