David Whyte Essentials

"It is not a coincidence that this book will slide easily into your jacket pocket; you'll want to keep it close for unexpected moments, those gifts of small, beckoning spaciousness amidst all our obligations and necessities. In addition to works written over a span of many years, plus one new poem and one new essay, the book contains David's personal reflections for many of the pieces, providing deeper context to its meaning. In some ways an artistic representation of a close circle of companionship to the work and to the man : edited by his wife, and designed and typeset by close friends Edward Wates and John Nielson, the book forms an elegant testament to David Whyte's most closely-held understanding - that human life cannot be apportioned out as one thing or another; rather, it is best lived as a living conversation, a way between and beyond, made beautiful by darkness as well as light, at its essence both deeply solitary and profoundly communal."--publisher's description.

In Consolations David Whyte unpacks aspects of being human that many of us spend our lives trying vainly to avoid - loss, heartbreak, vulnerability, fear - boldly reinterpreting them, fully embracing their complexity, never shying away from paradox in his relentless search for meaning. Beginning with 'Alone' and closing with 'Withdrawal', each piece in this life-affirming book is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden our perspectives on life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability, the experience of feeling overwhelmed and the desire to run away from it all. Through this lens, procrastination may be a necessary ripening; hiding an act of freedom; and shyness something that accompanies the first stage of revelation. Consolations invites readers into a poetic and thoughtful consideration of words whose meaning and interpretation influence the paths we choose and the way we traverse them throughout our lives.

The poems in Still Possible pay homage to the invisible passage of time - the deep, private current that wends through our lives as a steadfast companion, sculpting our interior worlds as inexorably and exquisitely as its visible manifestations. Whyte turns his eye, and his pen, to the possibilities and harvests this shaping reveals: the shyness and vulnerability of love, the illusion of imperfection, and the new invitations that beckon along the way. The poems reflect an abiding faith in time's wisdom: a journey turned away from in youth waits patiently for later maturity; an early experience ripens in secret to reveal, decades later, a full understanding. Under Whyte's poet-philosopher gaze, a rain-soaked day in an Irish farmhouse becomes a meditation on the essence of a truly good day: a settled contentment, alert and open to whatever may call. Plus, sheep, Seamus Heaney and a dog. Powerful language rests on a foundationof what isn't said, a silence underpinning the eloquence of articulation. In this way, Still Possible hovers above the numinous and the unknowable - what we pray for, what we pass on, what mystery awaits and, in the end, what it might mean to be happy.

A radical, "crystalline" (Elle) approach to integrating our work, relationships, and inner selves from the bestselling author, poet, and speaker. The author of Crossing the Unknown Sea and The Heart Aroused encourages readers to reimagine how they inhabit the worlds of love, work, and self-understanding. Whyte suggests that separating these "marriages" in order to balance them is to destroy the fabric of happiness itself. Drawing from his own struggles and the lives of some of the world's great writers and artists-from Dante to Jane Austen to Robert Louis Stevenson-Whyte explores the ways these core commitments are connected. Only by understanding the journey involved in each of the three marriages and the stages of their maturation, he says, can we understand how to bring them together in one fulfilled life.

This is David Whyte's fourth book of poetry

Whyte and O'Donohue explore memory, change, loss, and our place in life.

‘Great poems,’ David Whyte has said, ‘are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.’ Essentials is a collection of his own best poems, each in their way about capturing the experience itself, whether that is in the daily shifts, the ever-turning seasons or the bigger cycle of gain and grief that are part of our journey through life. Each poem is accompanied by a short context on where and when it was written. Together they form an elegant testament to David Whyte’s most closely-held understanding – that human life cannot be apportioned out as one thing or another; rather, it is best seen as a living conversation, a way between and beyond, made beautiful by darkness as well as light, at its essence both deeply solitary and profoundly communal. This updated edition includes poems from his 2021 collection, Still Possible.

This newly revised edition contains the most up to date versions of poems from David's first five volumes of poetry: Songs for Coming Home, Where Many Rivers Meet, Fire in the Earth, The House of Belonging and Everything is Waiting for You, as well as the latest versions of the new poems that originally appeared in the first edition of River Flow.