A Poem A Day
A Poem A Day: Latin America
There are places in the world where poetry does not merely belong to the page, but to the very air one breathes. Latin America is such a place. From the high plateaus of the Andes to the coastlines where waves beat like drums against the shores, from the cafés of Buenos Aires to the plazas of Mexico City, poetry has always been present: sung, recited, carried in memory, hidden in exile, whispered in love, shouted in protest. It is both intimate and political, tender and unflinching, born of solitude yet belonging to the collective.
In this volume of A Poem a Day, we journey through the landscapes and languages of Latin America, guided by poets who have given shape to the longings and struggles of their people. Countries represented in this anthology include Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Martinique, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Here, one finds the ardent voice of Pablo Neruda, whose odes embrace both a lover’s lips and a simple tomato. The luminous wisdom of Gabriela Mistral, who mothered generations through her verse. The fierce clarity of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, speaking across centuries from her convent in New Spain. The haunting testimonies of those silenced by dictatorships, and the resilient voices of contemporary poets writing from migration, borderlands, and diaspora.
To read Latin American poetry is to feel the intertwining of life and death, of earth and cosmos, of the personal heartbeat with the historical pulse. The region’s poets have written in Spanish and Portuguese, but also in Quechua, Mapudungun, Guaraní, Nahuatl, and countless other indigenous languages. Each poem carries echoes of conquest and resistance, of myth and survival, of exile and return.
This book, like the earlier volumes, offers one poem for every day of the year. Some days bring us fragments, some entire works, some voices long gone, and others still alive and writing. The range is deliberate. Poetry here is not a monument but a river that is sometimes fierce, sometimes quiet, always moving.
Each month unfolds with a theme, a way of entering the vastness of Latin America through a single lens: love, loss, landscape, revolution. Yet the poems resist confinement. They spill over because human experience cannot be neatly contained. My commentaries do not explain or reduce; they simply pause with you at the threshold of each poem, noticing, listening, sometimes asking questions rather than offering answers.
Latin American poetry teaches us that beauty can emerge from anguish, that tenderness can be an act of defiance, that silence too can be eloquent. To begin each day with such a voice is to remind ourselves of the resilience of the human spirit, and of the way art binds us to one another across distance and time.
I invite you to walk these pages as one would walk through a city or a forest: attentive, curious, open. May you find companions here for your own journey, may the cadence of these poems linger in your breath, and may Latin America’s gift of poetry become part of the music of your days.
With warmth and gratitude, Romilly.
5.0 out of 5 stars Where the Air Itself Speaks in Verse
Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2025
Living in Central America, this book feels less like an anthology and more like a mirror to the land itself. A Poem a Day: Latin America captures the pulse of a region that breathes poetry in every dawn mist, market cry, and passing rainstorm.
Each poem—whether whispered from Neruda’s Chile or sung from the highlands of Guatemala—feels like a new doorway into the soul of a continent that has taught me to listen differently. Some days it’s tender, others defiant, but always alive.
Reading it here, surrounded by the same light and color that shaped these verses, I felt not like an observer, but a participant in something timeless. This book doesn’t just give you poetry, it reminds you that you’re standing in the middle of one.
A Poem A Day: Middle East & North Africa
This sixth edition of A Poem A Day includes poets and poems from across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
There are poems from Algeria, Andalusia (the southernmost autonomous community in Peninsula Spain), Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Persia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen.
Poetry has always travelled further than the body. It crosses frontiers, slips past watchtowers, enters homes, markets, streets, places of worship, and the hidden spaces of the heart. In every culture, poetry has been a form of memory, resistance, prayer, and celebration.
This collection gathers voices from the Middle East and Northern Africa and their diaspora, weaving a year’s calendar of poems around themes that resonate with us all: homeland, women’s voices, storytelling and folklore, friendship and hospitality, war and loss, survival and hope, and transcendence. The intention of the themes is not to impose order but to offer a rhythm like the seasons of the year. This is not a comprehensive anthology, nor a scholarly one, but instead it is a daily companion of poems drawn from different countries, centuries, and traditions.
Here in this volume are ancient mystics and medieval voices alongside modern poets whose words carry emotions of our age, voices from exile, and echoes of those who wrote under censorship, in war, or in the quietude of personal grief.
The poems are presented one for each day of the year. Some are full texts, while others are brief verses chosen for their resonance rather than their length. You may read them sequentially, letting each day bring a surprise into your life, or you may wander, dipping into the calendar as a traveller might pause in different cities. Either way, the year unfolds as a journey: not chronological in history but cyclical in experience.
As always, I offer a brief meditation or reflection after each piece, not to explain, but to accompany you. I’m no expert in the lives of these poets. I am, as always, just a listener of the poetics in the quiet room.
So come with me. Come listen.
To the prayer of the prayerful.
To the local voices at the family food table.
To the storyteller’s golden tongue.
To the mysterious past of the Middle East’s remembered poets.
With warmth and gratitude, Romilly.
5.0 out of 5 stars A Wide-Ranging and Grounded Poetry Collection
Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2025
A Poem A Day: Middle East & North Africa is an impressive collection that brings together 366 poems from across the MENA region, offering one piece for every day of the year. What stands out most is the variety—different voices, styles, and themes are represented, giving readers a real sense of the region’s richness and diversity.
The structure makes it easy to read in small, daily portions, but it also works well if you want to sit down and explore several poems at once. The selections balance tradition with modernity, and the anthology gives you the sense of stepping into both the cultural history and contemporary life of these countries.
What I appreciate is that it doesn’t try to dress the poems up with unnecessary commentary or hype. The collection allows the writing to speak for itself, and in doing so, it creates a more authentic experience.
A Poem A Day: The African Continent
This fifth edition of A Poem A Day includes poets and poems from across the African Continent.
In previous volumes of A Poem A Day, we celebrated poets whose lives had passed prior to 1974, giving shape to the legacy they left behind. But this African Continent volume asks something different of us. The African literary renaissance began to blossom from the 1959s onward. In African cosmologies, the boundaries between past and present are often fluid. Here, we abandon the arbitrary restriction of the year of death and go beyond the grave and into the breath of living poets heard and read across the continent and its diasporas. Including past and present poets is a spiritual and poetic act of connecting today’s voices to ancestral lines.
Africa’s poetic tradition, as in cultures across the globe, began before the printed version. Many of its verses were chanted beside fires, carried in call-and-response, spoken in the rhythm of drums, or hidden inside songs that mothers sang to babies before sleep. Others were inscribed in Arabic script centuries ago or recorded under colonial surveillance, their power undimmed. This book offers both: the luminous oral verse and the insistent written poem.
Africa is not one voice. She is a multitude of rising, echoing, and returning voices. We celebrate all voices: the griots and resistance poets, the mystics, the revolutionaries, the lovers, the teachers, the silenced and the famous. Some you will know. Some have been waiting to be heard. All belong.
What does it mean to remember a voice? Especially one long silenced by history, exile, empire, or time?
A Poem A Day: the African Continent turns its ear toward the countries of Africa, not as a singular voice, but as a symphony of song, silence, rhythm, resistance, prayer, laughter, longing, and rebirth.
Each month gathers poems around a central theme to allow readers to experience not just the individuality of each poet, but the collective soul they contributed to. You may read daily, or you may sit with a single poem for days. Either way, let each word widen your world.
As always, I offer a brief meditation or reflection after each piece, not to explain, but to accompany you. I’m no expert in the lives of these poets. I am, as always, just a listener of the poetics in the quiet room.
So come with me. Come listen.
To the water-carrier’s lullaby.
To the freedom fighter’s whisper.
To the griot’s golden tongue.
To the echoing footfall of Africa’s remembered poets.
With warmth and gratitude, Romilly.
4.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Journey Through Africa’s Soul
Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2025
This book offered a daily moment of calm and reflection, with each poem opening a small window into Africa’s vast cultures and emotions. I especially appreciated the mix of historic and modern poets, which gave me a fuller picture of how African voices have evolved yet stayed rooted in tradition. The commentary by Romilly Wilde added a thoughtful layer, helping me understand deeper meanings behind each piece without overwhelming the reading experience. I’d recommend this book to poetry lovers, teachers, and anyone curious about Africa beyond what they see in the news or textbooks. It’s a moving and educational companion I’ll keep returning to throughout the year.
A Poem A Day: Australasia & the Pacific
This edition of A Poem A Day includes poets and poems from Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tahiti, Tonga, and more.
It should be noted that the Maori word for New Zealand is Aotearoa, with Aotearoa me Te Ika-a-Maui originally meaning North Island and Te Waipounamu meaning South Island. Generally, now, Aotearoa is referred to the islands that form New Zealand.
Some places do not raise their voices to be heard. They speak softly through eucalyptus winds, coral reefs, drifting outriggers, gull cries, sea chants, and desert sands. The voices of Australasia and the Pacific are like this. They are woven into waves and bark, salt and sky, rising quietly yet unmistakably when we pause to listen.
This fourth edition of A Poem A Day invites you into a lesser-lit constellation of poetic stars. Some known, many under-celebrated. Here, we journey through rugged high country and luminous reefs, through myth, song, and resistance. From the ancient dreaming of Australia’s First Nations to the lyrical mourning of colonized islands, each poem offers not only verse but presence of land, of spirit, of survival.
In curating this edition, I sought not merely national representation but emotional resonance. A Tuvaluan grandmother’s lullaby belongs beside a New Zealand war elegy. Some voices have been lost to time, but many are still sung today. All deserve to be heard.
Many of the poets included here, especially Indigenous and Pacific Island writers, carried oral traditions before they carried pens. Others wrote in languages that were taken from them, or that they used to reclaim their place in the world. Thus, the legacy of empire, migration, exile, and fierce joy threads through these pages.
There are days of sky-dreaming, saltwater prayer, fire scars, and mango rains. There are whales and women, warriors and wanderers.
In A Poem A Day, I bring you a few lines a day – just enough to make us look up, or in.
If you are holding this book somewhere far from the Pacific, may it carry the scent of pandanus and possibility. If you are reading this on the soil of Country or in the islands, may it reflect stories back to you with the reverence they deserve.
Let us read, then, with open ears and unhurried hearts. The ocean may be wide, but poetry brings us to each other’s shores.
With warmth and gratitude, Romilly.
4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Curated Collection
Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2025
Format: Kindle
I like the concept of this book, providing daily poems with a focus on writers from New Zealand, Australia, and the South Pacific. Sitting with a poem a day has been nice. I gave it four stars because of the formatting.
A Poem A Day: Asia & the Silk Road
This edition of A Poem A Day includes Asia (Central, West, South, and South-East) and countries along the ancient Silk Road: Afghanistan, Armenia. Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Iran (Persia), Iraq, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Türkiye (Turkey), Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen.
Where classic poems originate in the Arabian Peninsula, they are categorized under Saudi Arabia because it is the largest land in the Peninsula. The Arabian Peninsula covers Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
From the rice fields of Vietnam to the frozen steppes of Mongolia, from the Persian heartlands to the islands of Japan, Asia breathes poetry. It is found in sacred epics and in everyday verse. Here, in the world’s largest and most diverse continent, language has long been a bridge between soul and sky.
In this edition of A Poem A Day, we journey across Asia and the ancient Silk Road, tracing poetic voices that cross borders, generations, and empires. Some poets and poems are classical — engraved in memory and marble — while other poems speak of love, solitude, resistance, harvest, and rebirth, in a dozen tongues and rhythms.
Included in this edition are poets from Georgia and the Caucasus, where East and West blend and fuse in themountain winds.
As always, this is not an academic collection, but a celebration – a celebration of beauty, clarity, sorrow, survival, and transformation.
In selecting these 366 poems, I chose clarity over obscurity, feeling over theory. Each verse stands on its own — unillustrated, unadorned. Together, these verses mark the seasons, echo ancient times, and speak the daily truths of solitude, memory, nature, exile, longing, and belonging.
This book is a journey, a poetic almanac of the Asian and Silk Road spirit. Each day offers a single poem from a representative sample – sometimes austere, sometimes tender, and sometimes capturing the banal moments of people’s lives.
Let these poems accompany you — day by day — as lanterns in the wide night — then this book has done its work.
With warmth and gratitude. Romilly.
5.0 out of 5 stars Great collection
Reviewed in Germany on 13 August 2025
I enjoyed this poem collection. There are different themes across the months. I also liked the small comments by the author. My favourite poem was ” Moonlight trickles into the boat,
We are adrift between two worlds.”
A Poem A Day: United Kingdom, Ireland & Continental Islands
This edition of A Poem A Day includes the United Kingdom (UK), Ireland, and Continental Islands. Continental Islands include the Azores, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Corsica, Cyprus, Faroe Islands, Greek Islands, Iceland, Madeira, Malta, Novaya Zemlya, Sardinia, Sicily, and Svalbard.
This collection includes a balance of known and lesser-known voices, a range of time periods and linguistic or regional diversity. This includes Channel Islands, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scots, Welsh, and other voices unique to these lands.
The poets from these islands have their own charm and challenges. Their verses are cemented into cold stone chapels, mountain winds, wild seas, homely cottages, country paths, and remote regions.
This book is a journey, a poetic almanac of the island spirit. Each day offers a single poem — sometimes austere, sometimes tender — from a poet representative of the continental islands, away from the European mainland. Though many are long passed into dust and myth, their voices remain startlingly alive.
In selecting these 366 poems, I chose clarity over obscurity, feeling over theory. Each piece stands on its own — unillustrated, unadorned — so you can meet it on quiet terms. Together, these verses mark the seasons, echo ancient times, and speak the daily truths of solitude, memory, nature, exile, longing, and belonging.
Some poems you may know. Others, I hope, will find you just when you need them. If they become small companions through your year — then this book has done its work.
With warmth and gratitude from the edge of the Continent, Romilly.
5.0 out of 5 stars Feeling an affinity with words.
Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2025
This book is my 2nd purchase from this author. The book titled A Poem A Day
United Kingdom, Ireland & Continental Islands: 366 Days, One Lyrical Journey Through the Isles, a lengthy title and a near exhaustive treatment on the subject of poetry by famous and some unknown poets from the past. The commentary the author provides on each poem speaks volumes and the very idea of such a work is truly inspiring. It’s the kind of thing I wish I’d have thought of. Maybe it’s not too late but maybe with contemporary artists especially unknowns. A friend shared a copy with me and I have ordered my copy because I simply must have both these two books on my shelf. I admire the poets in this collection and I’m very familiar with their work. I enjoyed studying them back in college woking towards my bachelors in English, and I enjoy being refreshed again today with this book that is an education in itself. School is never out and learning is never finished. This book makes a great gift especially for English majors in college and for graduates. It’s perfect for poetry lovers in general. It’s perfect for anyone who feels an affinity with language. I will be sharing my copy with family and friends.
A Poem A Day: Continental Europe
Continental Europe, or mainland Europe, is generally defined as European countries excluding Great Britain and Ireland, and excluding the Azores, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Corsica, Cyprus, Faroe Islands, Greek Islands, Iceland, Madeira, Malta, Novaya Zemlya, Sardinia, Sicily, and Svalbard. These Continental Islands have their own edition of A Poem A Day.
Continental Europe is not a fixed idea. It is a series of crossroads that stretches over borders and centuries. Its poets — from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from the Alps to the Adriatic — have cemented their verses into cold stone chapels, mountain winds, smoky cafés, and kitchen tables warmed by old stoves and older sorrows.
This book is a kind of journey, a poetic almanac of the continental spirit. Each day offers a single poem — sometimes austere, sometimes tender — representative of European mainland country. Though many are long passed into dust and myth, their voices remain startlingly alive.
In selecting these 366 poems – one for each day of the year and an additional poem for a leap year – I chose clarity over obscurity, feeling over theory. Each piece stands on its own — unillustrated, unadorned — so you can meet it on quiet terms. Together, these verses mark the seasons, echo ancient times, and speak the daily truths of solitude, memory, nature, exile, longing, and belonging.
Some poems you may know. Others, I hope, will find you just when you need them. If they become small companions through your year — then this book has done its work.
With warmth and gratitude from the edge of the Continent, Romilly.
5.0 out of 5 stars A gem of a book
Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2025
Wow! This book is a collection of poems from famous poets of the past. The author makes short concise comments about each poem. This is a different kind of approach to poetry. Many of these poets are well known, like Rilke, and others not known so well for their poetry but perhaps famous for some other reason; for example, József Kiss, Hungary. I find this book riveting and as a poet, and a poetry lover, I am thrilled to find this treasure trove of poems. Like many writers I’m always shopping for vocabulary words, especially some adjective, or maybe a metaphor that is not over used. I give this book 5 stars for the insightful comments the author shares interpreting the poems; for the selection of poets and the selection of poems which is excellent. This book introduces great unknown poets from the 18th and even 17th centuries and from Europe. I highly recommend this book, especially to poets, students, and professors. The literature and the historical value far exceeds the price of the book.
