Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation

“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” —Mary Oliver

This luminous anthology brings together great poets from around the world whose work transcends culture and time. Their words reach past the outer divisions to the universal currents of love and revelation that move and inspire us all. These poems urge us to wake up and love. They also call on us to relinquish our grip on ideas and opinions that confine us and, instead, to risk moving forward into the life that is truly ours.

In his selection, Roger Housden has placed strong emphasis on contemporary voices such as the American poet laureate Billy Collins and the Nobel Prize–winners Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney, but the collection also includes some timeless echoes of the past in the form of work by masters such as Goethe, Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson.

The tens of thousands of readers of Roger Housden’s “Ten Poems” series will welcome this beautiful harvest of poems that both open the mind and heal the heart.

Customer Reviews:

A Luminous & Inspirational Poetry Anthology

By Jana L. Perskie "ceruleana" - August 8, 2005

Writer and editor Roger Housden's luminous and inspirational compilation of poetry "Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation," is one of the best anthologies of this type I have read or seen. This is Housden's fourth volume of a series that began with "Ten Poems To Change Your Life."

In "Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation," Housden selected 110 poems from around the world, whose poets' lives and works span the centuries. I frequently open the book at random and never fail to be moved. Housden has written: "Great poetry happens when the mind is looking the other way and words fall from the sky to shape a moment that would normally be untranslatable." Carl Sandburg wrote: "Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away." And from Emily... read more

To live is to risk

By G. M. Arnold "Geoff, that is" - July 20, 2005

A few days ago I picked up a copy of Roger Housden's anthology Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation. Today I opened it at a random page, and suddenly felt compelled to start reading the poem out loud. It was D. H. Lawrence's Deeper Than Love, and I found myself reading it slowly, lingering over the words, tasting them, feeling their weight on my tongue.

Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.

But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives alone

and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy and alone.

The noise of the air conditioner in the kitchen drowned my speech (it's a miserable night, dew point around 75, no central air) which was good: I was only reading for myself. I finished the Lawrence, and opened again at random: Billy Collins' This Much I Do Remember. Not a poem to read out loud, this one, but one to close your eyes and see what the poet had seen:

that I could feel it... read more

Strong Anthology

By Lothe - October 3, 2008

Roger Housden made his name with his series of "Ten Poems" books, featuring ten poems with his remarks. In Risking Everything he tries a slightly different format: a hundred and ten poems, sans commentary.

His selections run the gamut. Naturally, no one will be pleased with every choice, but everyone ought to like some choice: poets range from the ancient Chinese Chuang-tzu to modern American writers like Robert Bly and Billy Collins; themes include everything from Parkinson's Disease to the Buddha.

Although the book is, of course, suitable for browsing, Housden has obviously put careful thought into the order of the poems. For example, a poem about the perfect life may be adjacent to Robert Bly's "The Resemblance Between Your Life and a Dog";... read more