Each Night I Count My Children

After so much pain and suffering, we see at last a glimmer of hope—a plan for peace.  Its genesis is marred and murky. It is incomplete. It is shaky. It will not satisfy everyone. It may not last. But it is what we have, and we—all of us—have to make it work. And it will only work if our eyes are opened to the depth and breadth of the suffering of the people of Gaza, and our hearts are opened to our shared humanity.

This is the work that this book does. These poems document the nightmare—they show us, as only poetry can, what it is like to live inside it.  They are, as Mark Tredinnick has written, “partisan for peace and for life and for mothers and fathers and children. For hope and home. Even if you forget the circumstances under which they are written, they remarkable instances of poetry’s peace-making work, its soul-making, heart-breaking, mind-altering work: the way it has kept humanity (each of us and all of us) sane, made sense of senselessness, taught readers to find their own selves in the faces of the enemy (and the enemy’s victim), to love better for being implicated in both the violence and the resilience.”

This is why you should read this book.  But there is also a reason that you should buy it. There is a profound humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the organisations that stood ready to provide desperately needed aid have been unable to do so effectively. The barriers that prevented them from doing so are being removed. We need to make sure that they have the resources to deliver the manifold needs quickly and effectively, and to keep doing so for many months to come. Many people are helping to raise the necessary funds in many different ways. Our way is to commit to donating the gross revenue from sales of this book to Medicins sans Fontieres.