Reprinted from New Age Retailer with permission
Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words
Kim Rosen
$15.95 (P), ISBN 978-1-4019-2146-0
Hay House
www.hayhouse.com
What a great book! Please indulge me, for a moment, as I revel in finding out that there are many other people in the world for whom the right sequence of words fills the body and elevates the soul. “…a good poem, like the shaman’s drum, rattle, and song, changes consciousness.” Perhaps you already know you are one of us; perhaps you will read this book and find out that you are. Maybe you will want to use this book and your store to seek out other like-minded people. You might even try starting a healing poetry group. The time is certainly right for it, like it is for the Freedom Space gatherings in Iraq where Sunnis and Shiites risk their lives in order to speak poetry to each other.
The author has made a career based on the power of embracing poetry with the whole being. (“As I took more and more poems into my life, what began as a self-prescribed therapy for depression became the unwitting discovery of a transformational path.”) She shares with us how she takes a poem into her heart and lives with it. She describes the process by which she memorizes a poem so that it is stored in The Fourth Chamber of Memory (rote memory) and begins to sing to her. She tells us how she and others have spoken those Fourth Chamber poems to help themselves and others through traumatic times in their lives.
The book is much more joyful and less intellectual than the cover conveys. Each chapter ends with a poem. There is a resource guide and a list of 50 of the authors favorite poems in the back. The book also includes a CD on which Rosen and others speak and discuss poetry.
Anna Jedrziewski
Spirit Connection New York