This dazzling Christmas poem by Maya Angelou is powerful and inspiring for people of all faiths. In this beautiful, deeply moving poem, Maya Angelou inspires us to embrace the peace and promise of Christmas, so that hope and love can once again light up our holidays and the world. “Angels and Mortals, Believers and Nonbelievers, look heavenward,” she writes, “and speak the word aloud. Peace.” Read by the poet at the lighting of the National Christmas Tree at the White House on December 1, 2005, Maya Angelou’ s celebration of the “Glad Season” is a radiant affirmation of the goodness of life.

If you stop and look around you, you'll start to see. Tall marigolds darkening. A spring wind blowing. The woods awake with sound. On the wooden porch, your love smiling. Dew-wet red berries in a cup. On the hills, the beginnings of green, clover and grass to be pasture. The fowls singing and then settling for the night. Bright, silent, thousands of stars. You come into the peace of simple things. From the author of the 'compelling' and 'luminous' essays of The World-Ending Fire comes a slim volume of poems. Tender and intimate, these are consoling songs of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging. They celebrate and elevate what is sensuous about life, and invite us to pause and appreciate what is good in life, to stop and savour our fleeting moments of earthly enjoyment. And, when fear for the future keeps us awake at night, to come into the peace of wild things.

A collection of poems about peace by Anna Grossnickle Hines, accompanied by illustrations that feature quilts made by the poet.

From the Preface: I love the �Precedent� poems included here, for they remind us that our work includes history and models which we can learn from and adapt to our own times. These writers all take us back through Walt Whitman to Emerson�s definition of the poet�s role: �The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty,� and so a truthful �naming� and �saying� are a part of all of these beautiful poems. Denise Levertov�s poem �Life at War,� written during the Vietnam War, speaks to us immediately and directly by naming what has been lost in adopting a contemporary mindset of warfare: �our nerve filaments twitch in its presence/ day and night, / nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying, / nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, / the deep intelligence living at peace would have.� For her and the poets and readers here the poem bravely confronts the world and yet moves us to imagine the peace within it and ourselves. We offer this book as part of that intention.-Larry Smith

Excerpt from Peace: And Other Poems Certain of the poems here collected have appeared in different periodicals, The Spectator, The National Review, Macmillan's Magazine, The Thrush and The Sheaf. Two of them, the Ode to Music and the Coronation Ode, have been published, with music, by Messrs. Novello & Co. and Messrs. Boosey & Co. respectively. I take this opportunity of thanking the Editors and Proprietors concerned for the kind permission granted me to reprint the poems in question. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A collection of poetry by the former president shares Carter's private meditations and memories about his youth, family, friends, and politics. 75,000 first printing. $75,000 ad/promo. Tour.

This rich volume reflects the development of Berry's poetic sensibility. ''the Selected Poems of Wendell Berry makes available cartloads and heaps of clear and fluent work from Berry's fourteen books of poetry and four decades of writing, closely documenting the inner and the visible lives Berry sees and feels in agriculture and in nature.''