'Remarkable' ANDREW MOTION 'Profoundly affecting' LARA PAWSON 'Fantastic beguiling and
movingly profound' WILLIAM BOYD I was standing outside an apartment block that had been split
apart by a missile. The words of a poem came to me when I could no longer find my own. In
nearly four decades as a journalist covering conflict from Palestine to Kosovo to Rwanda
Channel 4 News International Editor Lindsey Hilsum has always carried a book of poetry. It
helps her make sense of the senseless salve her soul as the world around her rages and
remember those she has met in the darkest of times. In Ukraine she tweeted a poem a day and
people began to read to share to ask for more. Here Lindsey collects her favourite poems
from ancient times to modern translated from different languages and by writers from all
around the world. Alongside each she recalls a memory from her own work whether interviewing
the warlords of Bosnia and Sudan meeting child soldiers in Uganda or giving testimony about
the genocide in Rwanda. Her prose reveals comic absurdity and astonishing courage meaning and
its absence unexpected moments of love and the untold consequences that come long after most
cameras disperse. She explores the pity of war - and its fatal attraction. Vital authentic
a read like no other this is the first account Lindsey has written of her experience
accompanied by the voices of poets through the ages who have fought witnessed terror or fled
their homes yet found the words to capture their humanity.
