Review – Tell Me The Truth About Life

Posted March 10, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Tell Me The Truth About Life: A National Poetry Day Anthology

by Cerys Matthews (editor)

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 192
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Tell Me the Truth About Life is an indispensable anthology which celebrates poetry’s power to tap into the truths that matter. Curated and introduced by Cerys Matthews, this collection draws on the wisdom of crowds: featuring poems nominated for their insight into truth by a range of ordinary and extraordinary people: from Britain’s first astronaut, Helen Sharman, to sporting heroes and world-famous musicians, teachers, artists and politicians.

Their choices include contemporary work by Yrsa Daley-Ward, John Cooper Clarke and Kei Miller alongside classics by W H Auden, Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas. Here you will find poems to revive the spirit, ballads to mobilize and life-lines to hold you safe in the dark.

Compiled for National Poetry Day’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Tell Me the Truth About Life is a book that reminds us we are never completely alone in our search to glimpse the truth.

Containing nominations from a number of high-profile poetry lovers and poets, including Michael Morpurgo, Mark Gatiss, Dolly Alderton, and Helen Sharman, among others.

The poems featured in Tell Me The Truth About Life, edited by Cerys Matthews, are a bit of a mixed bag. Some are the type you come across in every single similar anthology, the famous ones that people like my grandmother have memorised. There were also a few surprises, poets I’d like to read more of.

I didn’t find that the little introductions written by various other readers were that helpful or added much, sadly: sometimes, reading someone else’s interpretation of a poem or what it means to them opens a poem right up, but the descriptions were too brief to offer much, and not very insightful.

What it did remind me was that I’d like to read more poetry again; it’s been a long time since I did, but I do have some favourites. Here’s one of them, while we’re here — Derek Walcott’s “Love After Love”:

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Rating: 3/5