Poems Of Gratitude - Hardcover

Emily Fragos is an award-winning poet and editor of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets anthologies The Great Cat, The Dance, Music's Spell, Art and Artists, and Letters by Emily Dickinson. She lives in New York City.

Foreword by Emily Fragos

Poets have for centuries offered thanks, praise, loving commemoration, devotion, and prayer for the people and the things of this world. Gratitude is a cherishing of what is, contrasted with what has been or could be. It is both an emotion and a practice, and it necessarily includes keen awareness of the sorrow and pain that give pleasure its value. The poems collected here express enormous joy in celebrating the beauties and relationships of our lives, but homage is also movingly paid to what is lost, to what is hurt, to what is hard to fathom and accept.

Poems of Gratitude is organized in nine chapters with some unavoidable overlapping: Giving Thanks, For Life, For Family, For Love, For Friendship, For Health, For Nature, Reverence, and Thanksgiving. The final section contains several perspectives on the American and Canadian holiday of Thanksgiving, but it also features more general tributes to autumn and the harvest, with poems that revel in nature’s bounty and poignant beauty as winter approaches. The concluding poem is one of the most beautiful in the English language: John Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” where even “the small gnats mourn/Among the river sallows” at summer’s end.

My hope is that these honest and heartfelt poems from authors ancient and modern, urban and rural, and from around the world, will deepen your own experience of gratitude. You will no doubt find many of your favorite works herein, but I hope that you will discover many new favorites, too.

May we all follow Mary Oliver’s wondrous words in “The Wild Geese” as we heed the “harsh and exciting” sounds of our world and enter fully, peacefully, and compassionately into “the family of things.”