Secret Chords: A Poetry Anthology of the Best of the Folklore Prize

"I shall savour it, poems when I need something beautiful." - John Carey, author of A Little History of Poetry. "Full of treasures." - The Tablet. Edited by Martin Connolly, Secret Chords is a unique anthology of poems collected during 2020 from poets and writers all over the UK and Ireland - a year when people collectively and individually dealt with isolation, separation, loss and anxiety as never before. Containing all these themes, Secret Chords remains a time capsule that captures some of the despair of the time, as well as the talent and imaginations of poets across the UK and Ireland, and contains hope for the future - with poems in this unique anthology that will inspire, console and stay with you long after you have closed the book. Entrants to the Folklore Prize were judged by Piers Plowright, Jehane Markham, and Sean Street - this book also contains original introductions and poems by the judges. From the introduction by acclaimed poet Seán Street: "The cumulative effect of reading these poems is a deep reassurance that in the midst of the maelstrom, there is a rich and caring humanity. Justice, empathy and a sense of history are themes in so much of the writing. Personally, I have particularly loved the poems that made me as a reader engage through an intensity of image and language, poems that took me to mental and emotional places in which, while sometimes I might have felt that I was being taken on a voyage I didn't fully understand, I was always held by the compression of thought, and the blend of the personal and the universal in the guiding idea behind the writing." Cover art: Saul and David, by Albert Adams (1956) with permission from the Estate of Albert Adams. Proceeds in aid of Pancreatic Cancer UK.