A remarkable Pocket Poets anthology of poems from around the world and across the centuries about illness and healing, both physical and spiritual. From ancient Greece and Rome up to the present moment, poets have responded with sensitivity and insight to the troubles of the human body and mind. Poems of Healing gathers a treasury of such poems, tracing the many possible journeys of physical and spiritual illness, injury, and recovery, from John Donne’s “Hymne to God My God, In My Sicknesse” and Emily Dickinson’s “The Soul has Bandaged moments” to Eavan Boland’s “Anorexic,” from W.H. Auden’s “Miss Gee” to Lucille Clifton’s “Cancer,” and from D.H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death” to Rafael Campo’s “Antidote” and Seamus Heaney’s “Miracle.” Here are poems from around the world, by Sappho, Milton, Baudelaire, Longfellow, Cavafy, and Omar Khayyam; by Stevens, Lowell, and Plath; by Zbigniew Herbert, Louise Bogan, Yehuda Amichai, Mark Strand, and Natalia Toledo. Messages of hope in the midst of pain—in such moving poems as Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” George Herbert’s “The Flower,” Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning,” Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” and Stevie Smith’s “Away, Melancholy”—make this the perfect gift to accompany anyone on a journey of healing. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. KARL KIRCHWEY is an award-winning American poet, book reviewer, creative writing teacher, translator, arts administrator, and literary curator. He has been a director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, directed the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr College, served as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome, and is currently a professor and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Boston University. FOREWORD   “De profundis clamavi,” goes the first verse of Psalm 130, “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.” Healing is not a final state; it is not an end. It is, instead, a process. Sometimes it begins in those depths, whether they are physical, mental, or spiritual, and moves toward recovery. Healing takes time: and from this point of view, it would seem to be uniquely unsuited to our moment, which is habituated to reaction, rapid absorption and constant change. Healing does not work this way. It shares with poetry the need for participation in a process, if it is to provide a true cure, a lasting relief. Nor does merely declaring a cure necessarily make that cure effective, because poetry works by means of laws as mysterious and yet irrefutable as those of science. In poetry there is the genuine cry and the feigned one, just as in medicine there is the genuine cure and the snake oil, and it is helpful to know the difference between them. As the poet, critic and translator Richard Howard observed long ago in another context, poetry is not a lotion or ointment to be slathered on the outside; it is an inner treatment.   I wrote the preceding paragraph in December 2019, having started to gather the poems for this anthology a year before that. Like everyone else in the age of the internet, I was simultaneously connected and disconnected, knowing and clueless, and was only peripherally aware of what had been happening in Wuhan, China. I had no idea that within three months, the Coronavirus pandemic would begin to infect millions, kill hundreds of thousands, and cause worldwide economic devastation.   My primary care physician is also a scholar of the Vedas. Suffering from what I learned was labyrinthitis, an infection of the inner ear causing vertigo, I asked him why dizziness often results in a feeling of intense nausea. He looked at me and smiled and said, “Medicine is not very good at answering the question Why. ” I was surprised at this response, from one as wise as he. I thought doctors were scientists. I thought answering the question Why? was the essence of any medical diagnosis. But maybe this is partly a matter of focus. In her memoir Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab , Christine Montross writes, “At times, in fact at most times, specific knowledge in medicine seems to be better understood than general knowledge.” Poets, on the other hand, sometimes use the specifics of the world around them to arrive at a more general knowledge of what it means to be alive.   This anthology tracks a process beginning in illness, moving through a diagnosis (whether or not it answers the question Why? ) to the identification of a remedy, and the possibility of healing. As the only creatures we know of afflicted with a lifelong knowledge of our own eventual extinction, of course we rejoice in our recovery. That rapture take