Poems to Mend a Broken Heart

A few years ago, I built myself this website and – not nearly as often as I planned to do – wrote some blog posts for it on bookish and poetic subjects. I assembled books about World War II, Paris and artists, and recommended dark academia, speedy and historical fiction reads. I recommended poems about trees, dinosaurs, cats, friendship, motherhood and more. But people flocked to my website for one page in particular: an article I’d written back in the eerie autumn of 2020: Poems to Mend a Broken Heart.

My rather basic website was emitting a siren call through the vast and tangled web we spend so much time ensnared in, and the broken hearted were turning up in droves. Unwittingly, I had followed a golden rule of marketing and SEO: solve a problem for people! Shout about it in your title! Readers came, and they kept coming.

All over the world – from Mexico to Moldova, from Argentina to Azerbaijan – people in the throes of heartbreak had done as those before them had done for centuries. They had reached for poetry. When lost love leaves us bereft, when it turns out they were actually not our happy ever after — not with those habits! — we grope for the wisdom of those who have walked this way before us. When devotion has died, how do we move past Our Song on tearful repeat to play a new tune? Has anyone, anywhere ever felt this sad? Will the sun ever shine on us again? Will we feel better if we put their picture on the dart board?

This is when we most need to feel the kind touch of another reeling heart through the page. Reading words that might have been written hundreds of years ago – but have endured, because so many have turned to them – we feel just a little less alone.

So I have been squirrelling away poems for those readers – the ones that made me cry, and the rousing ones that made me want to punch the air – and gathered them into a new anthology. There are poems here by Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Lord Byron, by Emilys Brontë and Dickinson, Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owen, words that have comforted the lovelorn for generations and endure still. And there are brilliant poems by today’s literary superstars from Carol Ann Duffy and Naomi Shihab Nye to Wendy Cope and Nikita Gill, and a galaxy of rising stars, too, all of whom have wise or vengeful or humorous or uplifting words to share.

I hope You Can Do It With A Broken Heart will take the reader on a journey… from loss and longing, through rage and railing, to the moment when – at last – things start to look brighter, with better times beyond. I’m so excited for it to meet readers. I hope it eases just one heart a little.

You Can Do It With A Broken Heart is published now.