A poem a day is my prescription for a good life.  Everyday language is, as Flaubert once said, “a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to — while we long to make music that will melt the stars”.  Poetry makes of language that melting kind of music.

This is why reading a poem a day has a transforming effect on our lives.  It’s not just that artfully arranged words elevate our existence, fulfilling our neglected need for depth and beauty and grace and meaning. Just as more important is the act of making poetry a priority.

Taking the time to open the head, and heart, and soul space that needs to open if this serious pleasure is to be indulged, giving ourselves that gift.

This act, as much as the words ingested, is vital to how poetry melts, melds and moulds us.

The Christmas season provides the perfect space to make daily poetry a habit and in this pamphlet, you’ll find a poem for each of the twelve days of that season. They all relate in some way to the story we’ve been telling for 2000 years about what happened in Bethlehem on a certain 25th December.

Some of the poems reassert that story, some challenge it, some see it as purely symbolic — but all are engaged with the deeper questions that underwrite it.

To read them, go HERE (USA)

Or HERE (UK).