My poetry collection LOVE POEMS is officially out (you can find it on > Amazon). I hope you will consider it as the perfect small gift for someone you love.

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As a poet, I am constantly asking myself where the secrets of the soul and of the heart lie hidden, and how human beings manage to face life even in its most difficult moments – whether these arise from personal circumstances or from events that affect us collectively. And inevitably, the answer is one and the same. It is precisely in our hardest hours that we come to understand what truly matters in our private lives, seek new meaning in our actions, and discover fresh reasons to build a better world: for ourselves and for the small circle of people, places, and things over which we can exert a direct influence.

I see this in the glimmer of understanding in my children’s eyes. In the past few weeks I have seen my teenage son make an enormous – and therefore deeply precious – effort to speak kind words before we part for the day. Together, we have reflected on what it would mean, in the event of a tragedy, to look back on our last words to one another and find them wanting.

And so today I wish to return to something more human, more alive: love in all its forms: passionate, tender, hopeful, desperate, untamed. The love that returns, the love that lingers in memory, the love we idealize and imagine… and the real love, the kind that continues to breathe even after many years together. A single voice that runs through everything, in its highest notes and its lowest: in joy and in desolation, in exaltation and in darkness.

Elizabeth Gilbert, in her worldwide bestseller Eat Pray Love (Chapter 50), wrote:

“I remember a story my friend Deborah the psychologist told me once. Back in the 1980s, she was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could volunteer to offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees—boat people—who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah is an exceptional psychologist, but she was terribly daunted by this task. These Cambodians suffered the worst of what humans can inflict on each other—genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West where people died and corpses were fed to sharks—what could Deborah offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering? “But don’t you know,“ Deborah reported to me, “what all these people wanted to talk about, once they could see a counselor?“ It was all: I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love. I thought he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats, and he took up with my cousin. Now he’s married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can’t stop thinking about him. And I don’t know what to do… This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, “There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.”

LOVE POEMS (on Amazon) is my attempt to give that force a voice. Love is what enables us every day to wake up and remain connected, alive, human.