Other books that might interest you

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  Works and Days

  Hesiod

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  Works and Days by Hesiod is a timeless piece of ancient Greek literature that blends moral instruction, practical guidance, and mythological storytelling into a deeply reflective poetic work. Written in the 8th century BCE, this didactic poem offers insight into the values, struggles, and daily realities of early agrarian society, while delivering enduring lessons on justice, labor, and human conduct.
  
  Addressed to Hesiod's brother Perses, the poem unfolds as both a personal admonition and a universal guide for living a virtuous and productive life. Through a combination of advice and allegory, Hesiod emphasizes the dignity of honest work, the importance of fairness, and the consequences of idleness and greed. His words reflect a worldview in which human effort, guided by moral integrity, is essential to survival and prosperity.
  
  Interwoven with practical farming instructions and seasonal guidance, Works and Days also presents powerful myths, including the tale of Prometheus and Pandora, which explore the origins of human suffering and the necessity of toil. These stories serve not only as cultural touchstones but also as moral frameworks that reinforce the poem's central themes.
  
  Hesiod's voice is both personal and authoritative, offering wisdom that transcends time. His reflections on justice, hardship, and perseverance continue to resonate with readers across generations. Works and Days stands as a foundational text that bridges mythology and everyday life, inviting readers to reflect on the value of discipline, the rhythms of nature, and the enduring pursuit of a just and meaningful existence.

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  The Inner Landscape - Explore...

  John O'Donohue

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  Our bodies are mere outlines of a vast and complex interior world, a landscape of contradiction and immense mystery. This Celtic view of the human condition predates Christianity, yet survives to this day as part of Ireland's unique spiritual tradition. With The Inner Landscape, poet and philosopher John O'Donohue explores the themes of self-exile and hardship, and the Celtic way of welcoming paradox and finding precious light in the darkest valleys of our inner terrain.“Instead of fearing the contradictions of the outer world,” O'Donohue begins, “the Celtic people welcomed them.” They developed special blessings for times of suffering in the belief that hardship leads to a special insight or gift of the spirit. When you learn the Celtic “secret of equilibrium”—how to see every difficulty as a threshold of possibility—you renew your life with unending possibilities. Despite our vast technologies, O'Donohue says, our real knowledge is minimal. Only within “the inner landscape” with which we are each blessed can true knowing take place.

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  The Mother's Secret - A...

  Clare Swatman

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  There’s nothing a mother wouldn’t do for her children – even if it means telling a lie… 
  Sisters Georgie and Kate have always been close. Brought up by their mum Jan after the death of their father, this family of women have always been able to rely on each other.  
  Jan loves her daughters with all her heart. She knows some people think she’s an over-protective mother, but they didn’t know what she knows. She has always kept her girls close but now she can feel them slipping away. 
  Secrets have a nasty habit of refusing to stay hidden, and now Georgie and Kate are about to discover that while lies can cause pain, the truth could destroy them all. 
  Two beloved girls. The mother who adores him. The secret that could tear them apart. 
  Bestselling novelist Clare Swatman returns with a heart-breaking, devastating, but ultimately uplifting story about mothers, daughters and the bonds of love. 
  Praise for Clare Swatman: 
  'Before We Grow Old is an unashamedly big, life-affirming, tear-jerking love story. Beautifully told, characters Fran and Will had me from the first page, and crying buckets by the last ! Just gorgeous.' Katy Regan 
  'Before We Grow Old took me on an intense emotional journey, and I cried at the end (and I rarely cry when I'm reading!) The portrayal of the mother and son bond - with its peaks and troughs of intensity and frustration - felt incredibly real, and the dialogue in particular was brilliantly done.' Victoria Scott  
  'A beautifully written tale of enduring love' - Rowan Coleman  
  'Irresistible . . . A delightfully bittersweet story that will appeal to fans of One Day' - Sunday Mirror 'Wonderful' - Sun

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  Modern Poetry - Poems

  Diane Seuss

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  Diane Seuss's signature voice—audacious in its honesty, virtuosic in its artistry, outsider in its attitude—has become one of the most original in contemporary poetry. Her latest collection takes its title, Modern Poetry, from the first textbook Seuss encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college, as an enrapt but ill-equipped student, one who felt poetry was beyond her reach. Many of the poems make use of the forms and terms of musical and poetic craft—ballad, fugue, aria, refrain, coda—and contend with the works of writers overrepresented in textbooks and anthologies and those too often underrepresented. Seuss provides a moving account of her picaresque years and their uncertainties, and in the process, she enters the realm between Modernism and Romanticism, between romance and objectivity, with Keats as ghost, lover, and interlocutor. 
   
   
   
  In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Modern Poetry investigates our time's deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? "It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem," Seuss writes. "You can't hide / from what you made / inside what you made." What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.

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  The Little Mud-Sparrows

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

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  LibriVox volunteers bring you 13 recordings of The Little Mud-Sparrows by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for December, 4, 2011. This poem is taken from CHRISTMAS IN LEGEND AND STORY; A Book for Boys and Girls, complied by Elva S. Smith, Carnegie Library Pittsburgh and Alice I. Hazeltine, Public Library St. Louis 1915. (from the book's frontispiece)

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  Spirits Over the Valley

  Ty Tice, Betsy Tice

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  There are spirits; some are Holy and good. Others are evil, creating chaos, and over some places, strongholds.  Everyone is affected by these spirits.  It doesn't matter that you can't see them because they surround you.  Do you have the spiritual eyes to see? 
   
  Sumpterville is like many small villages nestled in the mountains.  The struggles and hardships are common to all mankind.  There is Hope, but will they find it?  Eleven families reveal their innermost thoughts and fears.  Good and Evil linger above.

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