Poems for life Alllliie Esiirii Opiiniion - Books Tuesday, 4th October 2016

In advance of National Poetry Day, anthologist Allie Esiri writes about the power of poetry to change lives

TS Eliot claimed that "poetry can communicate before it is understood". When I discovered poetry as a child, I remember stumbling over weird and wonderful words whose meaning I felt far from understanding, but I think I knew then that poetry held a remarkable power. My childhood private passion has become my career: I spend most of my time reading poetry, writing about poetry, and banging the metaphorical drum for poetry. Over the past few years I've tried to remind people how remarkable and exhilarating poetry is. I've co-created apps such as iF Poems and The Love Book, where fantastic actors - Helena Bonham Carter, Tom Hiddleston, Damian Lewis, Helen McCrory, Emma Watson and others - read poems aloud, taking ancient words off the page and bringing them to life. Humans have been writing poetry for thousands of years - even before we had written languages, people spoke poetry aloud in an oral tradition, preserving history and mythology in huge poetic sagas that changed and developed with each retelling. Poets manage to put into words what most of us find hard to articulate. To Alexander Pope, poetry was "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd". Gwendolyn Brooks said that "poetry is life distilled". And when I read John Keats's "To Autumn", which seems to breathe out the smells and tastes and sights of the season, I have to agree with her. It is an extraordinary thing poetry can do. We find an idea so complex or personal or powerful expressed in language that is overwhelmingly beautiful. Or as Emily Dickinson wrote, suggesting that poetry is something to be felt rather than thought about, "if I feel as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry". William Wordsworth once wrote of beauty "felt along the heart", like waves beating along a shore. We feel poems along the heart - they wash over us, and though we might not notice the impact they make, they leave the shores of our hearts a little changed. Great poems make us more human. They introduce us to new ways of seeing the world. They force us to imagine what it might be like to be someone completely different - and they show us that someone completely different is just as human as we are. Yet the power of poetry is also connected to memory. Poems often seem to me somewhere between normal language and music. In some languages the word for poetry and music is the same. When we read poems we are not just captured by the meanings of the words but in their sounds. These musical aspects of poetry - rhythm, rhyme, alliteration - are what help make the lines stick in our heads. Decades after first reading William Blake's "The Tyger", I know that the terrifying creature is "burning bright / In the forests of the night"; I still hear that pulsing rhythm as the sound of huge paws echoing through the darkness. Before I knew what rhythm and rhyme were, I felt them. Then, as now, poetry communicated before it was understood.

www.bookbrunch.co.uk Design by: BDS Digital © BookBrunch Ltd. Recent studies have shown that Alzheimer's patients who have lost most of their memories can often still access poems or songs they learnt as children. The recently deceased Geoffrey Hill, former Oxford Professor of Poetry, talked of how as a teenager he used to walk for entire days carrying only a battered anthology of poems, reading and reciting them until the entire book was inside his head. Those poems never left him, their lines always available, always a comfort. So: take a poem, learn it, perform it. It'll stay with you for life. We use poetry to help us come to terms with the big things in life: love, friendship, loss, nature, beauty, and the passing of time. People write and read poems for landmark events - weddings, funerals, political uproars, or tragic disasters. But I wanted to share in this anthology that poetry can also be for the small things in life, for the everyday. This anthology contains a poem for each and every night of the year. More than being just a sequence of beautiful poems to share at bedtime, however, this is a journey through culture and history and the seasons. Near April Fool's Day are poems that are nonsense but huge fun to read aloud, such as Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky". And there are poems on certain dates that tell us about the traditions of other cultures and religions. There are poems written about historical events, such as the sinking of the Titanic, or the seminal moment in the Civil Rights Movement in America when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus. I hope that there is a poem for everyone here - something for every night and every mood and every person, whose lines never leave you but remain inside the private library of your brain, and whose beauty you feel as Wordsworth did: along the heart. Photo (Rolf Marriott): Esiri at the launch of A Poem for Every Night of the Year (Macmillan) with (from left) actor Juliet Cowan, Gaby Morgan (Macmillan Children's ), and actor Beatie Edney. Cowan and Edney read from the anthology.

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