Teaching Neruda

Poetry is often the best tool available for discovering how we feel about the small and mostly overlooked aspects of our everyday experience. B. T. Joy's Teaching Neruda, a series he wrote while teaching high school English, focuses on this feature of the art through the lens of its most celebrated masters. The collection explores the most poignant messages of poets as diverse as Pablo Neruda and William Carlos Williams, Philip Levine, Izumi Shikibu and Wang Wei, together with visual artists, musicians and spiritual figures from an array of ages and persuasions. The effect is a group of poems which take the reader on a spatial, temporal and emotional journey informed by a joy for literature and words and a love of expression and experience.