Publisher's Synopsis
This anthology is not intended simply as required reading for the devout believer or even the passionate devotee of poetry. Instead it welcomes the ordinary reader who turns to literature for guidance and counsel in times of personal difficulty and doubt. Divided into five main sections, it offers the reader paths down which to travel, sharing along the way some of the most common experiences of humankind. Areas of experience that are not exclusively religion's domain but which poets down the ages have sought to make sense of as individuals: the death of a spouse or child, loneliness, fear of mortality, even a sudden sense of the splendour of the natural world. All The Days Of My Life is a guide for the perplexed, the disenchanted, the sorrowful, but also for the grateful, the glad and the inquisitive, encapsulating as it does all the major poets writing in English, placing in a human context concerns which are more than human. This book is a very modern reworking of the great human cries of the Psalms of old. Literature is like a form of time-travel, enabling the reader to journey from biblical times to the Middle Ages to the present-day, from Ecclesiastes to Chaucer to Les Murray, Shakespeare to Matthew Arnold to Seamus Heaney. There are as many different views of the world as there are poets. And yet, somehow, in Philip Davis' wonderful anthology, they are all concerned with the same thing: life and how to endure it, enrich it, love it.
