Poems that arrive like gentle reminders that life is happening — right now, right here — and it’s trying to tell you something.

Following the quiet cult success of Julian of Norwich’s Teabag — described by Bono in the New York Times as his ‘favourite book no one’s heard of’ — poet and broadcaster Martin Wroe returns with this luminous new collection. His work bridges the spiritual and the secular with the grace of someone who’s not trying to win an argument — it just tells the truth beautifully and often makes you laugh along the way.

This breath that calls to stillness
This heart that holds a universe
This fleeting understanding
That both are still expanding

Every day is a poem. The trees bowing to each other in the breeze. The cyclist pedalling through the air. That song about you on the radio. A robin waiting for you to answer her question. A loved one whose life is disappearing. Poem or prayer, psalm or song, all the same exercise in getting silence to cough up some truth. Every day is a poem. And everyone we meet. 

This heart does not exist
This heart is a metaphor
This heart is a poem
The truest thing of all

Martin Wroe lives with Meg, a painter, in North London where they find life in an eccentric community located around a small church. A former staff writer on The Independent and The Observer and a chair of the Greenbelt Arts Festival, Martin is an associate member of the Iona Community, contributes to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, and is the author of Julian of Norwich’s Teabag. He was late to realise that religions are poems and now tries to make one every day.