Life Saving: Why We Need Poetry

by Josephine Hart

Josephine Hart, author of the bestselling novel Damage, had what she called 'a long love affair' with poetry. It was an affair that started as a child and lasted until her untimely death at the age of sixty-nine in 2011. She said 'I was a word child' growing up in Ireland 'a country of word children where life was language before it was anything else'. As a teenager and later she found the poetry of Eliot, Larkin, Yeats and others a lifeline, 'a route map through life'.



In the late 1980s, Hart, by now a successful West End theatre producer, began a hugely popular event in which actors read the words of the great poets to an enraptured audience. In 2004, The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour moved to the British Library, where it remains today. By her own admission, Josephine Hart gave 'dead poets society' . But she also gave them intelligent and exciting introductions; all of which are now collected here in this volume. They are insightful, even great, works in their own right.



Life Saving leaves us an inspiring legacy. It takes us on a journey of the imagination to some of the greatest poems written in the English language and allows us to understand, intuitively and deeply, why poetry matters.

Genres: Poetry

320 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2012

About the author

Josephine Hart was born and educated in Ireland. She was a director of Haymarket Publishing, in London, before going on to produce a number of West End plays, including The House of Bernarda Alba by Frederico Garcia Lorea, The Vortex by Noel Coward, and The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch. She was married to Maurice Saatchi and had two sons. She was the author of Damage. Hart died, aged 69, of ovarian cancer in June 2011.

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A selection of short introductions and poems.

[Kayleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely set of introductions to a number of great poets and their works! I would like to thank this book for introducing me to To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity by Marianne Moore, which is the cruelest poem I have ever read, and my new favourite.

[Griflet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learnt more, and understand more, about poetry from this book than I ever did at Uni.
Context really is everything for me.