My guest this week on Poetry from Daily Life is Heather Lende ... I did not grow up holding hands and reading poems at the dinner table. My family were “stiff upper lip” white, Anglo-Saxon ...

Seamus Heaney’s love-poem to marriage, The Skunk ... holding/ her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,/ I felt a violent wonder at her presence/ like a thirst for salt”.

Love is a bond that strengthens with every little detail, with every word we whisper in the ear of the one who walks with us through life ... your firm hand in mine, is my eternal direction.

The poem concentrates on tactile, concrete details: the child’s coat, the man’s nose, the apple in her hand. But the intensity ... Mary published “Meaning a Life,” a memoir about the ...

Plunkett, whose book offers close readings of the poems as well as the life, quite likes “My Butterfly ... to contemplate the world at hand.” Or again: Of the creed’s manifold meaning ...

his poem Ceasefire touched many people: ’I get down on my knees and do what must be done And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son’. Increasingly, it is as a poet of nature that Michael ...

and I was deft at four square with my right hand. But left was where life started, with my left-handed mother; where sentences began when I read a book or wrote, from left to right. Maybe ...