Ten Poems to Open Your Heart

The author of Ten Poems to Change Your Life offers personal reflections on poems about love in a slim volume best enjoyed by people who don't ordinarily read poetry. Selections include Denise Levertov's ""The Ache of Marriage,"" Galway Kinnell's ""Saint Francis and the Sow,"" Naomi Shihab Nye's ""Kindness"" and Pablo Neruda's ""Love Sonnet LXXXIX""; while the poems approach love from different angles, they share extremely ""accessible style and language"" (a prerequisite for inclusion) and offer an essential instruction to ""Wake up and Love!"" Housden follows each poem with an enthusiastic and often treacly discussion in which stories from his life weave in and out of a sort of basic emotional exegesis: Kinnell's poem will ""give you the feeling of wanting to live large again on the canvas of you life,"" while with Neruda's, ""you will know the tenderness...as I knew it this morning while reading this sonnet...to my wife in bed."" This is a warm-hearted volume, and an encouraging entry point for readers who generally shy away from verse, but many readers may feel that there's a bit too much of Housden's flowery prose and not enough poetry here.