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    101 Poems to Get You Through the Day (and Night)
    101 Poems to Get You Through the Day (and Night)
    101 Poems to Get You Through the Day (and Night)
    Ebook138 pages53 minutes

    101 Poems to Get You Through the Day (and Night)

    By Daisy Goodwin

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This is an anthology designed to help you get through the stresses of modern life. For rapid and effective relief around the clock, 24-7, without side effects, try a poem -- whatever the time of the day (or night), you can be sure that some poet, past or present, has been there too.

    To help you find the right poem at the right time, the organization of the book is like that of a book of hours. Starting with Getting Up, it then moves on to those other morning traumas: Stepping on the Scale and Looking into the Mirror.

    As the day moves on there are sections to cover everything, from Office Politics to Off to School. And if by five p.m. your head is throbbing, dig into the poems in the Take 5 section and let the world recede. By the end of the day you may want to look for inspiration among the poems in Going Home, but if you are intent on veering from the straight and narrow, then turn to the Behaving Badly poems and you'll find you're in good company. Anyone who feels vaguely guilty about settling down in front of the TV instead of taking café society by storm should turn to the poems in the Not Tonight section.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 9, 2010
    ISBN9780062028617
    101 Poems to Get You Through the Day (and Night)
    Author

    Daisy Goodwin

    Daisy Goodwin is a television producer and writer. She is married with two children and lives in London.

    Read more from Daisy Goodwin

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    Reviews for 101 Poems to Get You Through the Day (and Night)

    3.5/5

    16 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Some good poems here, I could see this making a great gift for someone you don't know well. Personally, I prefer to read poems by the same author rather than a smattering. Did discover a few new poets I would like to read more of though.
    • 4/5
      I encountered these slim and stylish poetry books on a friend's coffee table. They are very accessible, with poems collected into themic chapters such as 'getting over it' and 'do the right thing'. They are a pleasantly balanced mix of old classics and new poetry too.
    • 3/5
      This was a gift from my mother. It has helped comfort me sometimes, but tends to sit on my shelf gathering dust. But I'm not a huge fan of poetry at the best of times, so that's probably just me.
    • 4/5
      just as it says a survival kit

    Book preview

    101 Poems to Get You Through the Day (and Night) - Daisy Goodwin

    INTRODUCTION

    At first the little things that get you through the day are harmless enough: the extra shot of espresso in your caffe latte, the lunchtime shopping spree, typing your name into an Internet search engine, reading more than one horoscope. Despite this cobweb of little treats, the days (and the nights) seem to get longer, and more serious supports are needed: long drinks shaded by miniature umbrellas, arsenals of painkillers containing codeine, a growing stack of books with titles that are too long to say in one breath—Men Who Love Women Who Can’t Commit on Thursdays, Find Your Inner Child and Take it Shopping, Feng Shui Your Fridge and Discover the Body You’ve Always Wanted. But still the days drag on, more relief is needed: men with sculptured chests and women with implausibly thin inner thighs bang on your door at seven A.M. to take you jogging; you pay people to stick needles into your earlobes; you lie down on a narrow couch covered with an Indian bedspread three times a week and explain to a silent listener why the days still seem too damn long. And yet the ordeal continues; the truly desperate look for oblivion in brown and white powders or drinks with alcohol contents higher than their salaries. But there is an alternative that does not involve writing checks or a phone bill that runs into thousands. The poems in this book offer another way to answer Philip Larkin’s question: What are days for?

    A good poem—the right words in the right order—is human experience at its most concentrated. Open the right poem at the right moment and you will be intoxicated by the distillation of meaning; as its sense unravels you will find it reaching into the nooks and crannies of your mind. As someone who has tried pretty much every way of getting through the day (except of course the illegal ones), I can vouch for the effectiveness of poetry as a powerful antidote to the miseries of modern life. I only wish I’d discovered it earlier—my teenage years would have been considerably more dignified if I had read Wendy Cope’s poem Two Cures for Love:

    1 Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter.

    2 The easy way: get to know him better.

    I recommend it as part of any emotional repair kit. Another essential component is Keats’s Ode on Melancholy. I first read it at school where I learned to write knowledgeably on three sides of large sheets of paper about its imagery, but its real meaning eluded me until I had a bout of depression in my twenties and I read it again. What helped me then as much as all the therapy and pharmaceuticals was the poem’s central point that melancholy is as much a part of life as happiness and that one cannot exist without the other. Learning to accept that sadness has its own rewards is the quickest and most lasting route to recovery.

    But poetry is not only there for the major crises; good poems can smooth away some of life’s minor irritations: diets, driving tests, dating. Anyone who wants to be irresistible to the opposite sex has only to read Siren Song by Margaret Atwood for the secret: Alas / It is a boring song / but it works every time. There are poems for ancient miseries like toothache and poems for more modern afflictions such as the computer helpline. But unlike self-help books or long drinks, these poems are not just there to bring instant relief. Keep these words in your head and furnish your mind with beautiful textures, swatches of rich meaning that you can use to illuminate the most dreary situation. You are never alone with a poem.

    To help you find the right poem at the right time the book is arranged like a medieval book of hours—those lushly illustrated manuscripts that held an office or prayer for every moment of the day. This anthology starts, logically, with Getting Out of Bed, and then moves on to those other morning traumas: Stepping on the Scale and Looking in the Mirror. As the day moves on there are sections that deal with Office Politics, Off to School, and Escape Routes. And if by five P.M. your head is throbbing, turn to the poems in the Take 5 section and let the world recede. For the reader who is considering having a quick one of whatever variety, there is the Going Home collection to keep you on the straight and narrow; but if it is too late for second thoughts then turn to the Behaving Badly poems, which will equip you with all the excuses you need. If you would really rather go home, but have been inveigled into some unwelcome social activity, then rather than take an assertiveness training course, turn to the Just Say No section. And for anyone who feels vaguely guilty about settling down in front of the TV instead of taking café society by storm then I recommend the poems in the Not Tonight category—Being Boring by Wendy Cope in particular.

    As part of this survival kit for modern life, I have included poems for the big occasions as well as the small moments. There are poems for weddings, funerals, and even christenings, as well as poems to read when you wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat; when the phone just won’t ring or when you’re seized by dotcom millionaire envy. Not every day is the same thank goodness (if it is you need the Escape Routes section urgently). You might need to refer to

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