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River Poems
River Poems
Jan 13, 2026 3:35 AM

Author:Various,Henry Hughes

River Poems

Rivers were the arteries of our first civilizations - the Tigris and Euphrates of Mesopotamia, India's Ganges, Egypt's Nile, the Yellow River of China - and have nourished modern cities from London to New York, so it is natural that poets have for centuries drawn essential meanings and metaphors from their endless currents.

English poets from Shakespeare and Dryden, Wordsworth and Byron to Ted Hughes, John Betjeman and Alice Oswald; Irish poets - Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, to name but a few; Scottish and Welsh poets from Henry Vaughan and Robert Louis Stevenson to Robin Robertson and Gillian Clarke. A whole raft of American poets from Whitman, Emerson and Emily Dickinson to Langston Hughes, Mary Oliver, Natasha Trethewey and Grace Paley. Folk songs. African-American spirituals. Poems from ancient Egypt and Rome. From medieval China and Japan. And a truly international selection of modern poets from Europe (France, Italy, Russia, Serbia), India, Africa, Australia and South and Central America, all combining in celebration of the rivers of the world. From the Mississippi to the Limpopo. From the Dart to the Danube.

Plunge in.

Reviews

Slick and polished...immersive productions of much-loved novelisations...long may we enjoy them

—— Doctor Who Magazine

Joyce is a fearless explorer of emotional landscape; Maureen's pilgrimage north becomes
a moving account of healing and acceptance.

—— Patricia Nicol , Sunday Times

Exquisite and beautifully crafted

—— Ruth Jones , Daily Mail

A beautiful novella ... with compassion and tenderness ... the novel's conclusion is deeply moving and life-affirming.

—— Hannah Beckerman , Observer

Very rarely, there is a writer who can touch the deepest and most hidden parts of the soul, by using the everyday matter of our daily lives to reveal the sacred that always surrounds us. This writer is Rachel Joyce, and her trilogy starting with The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, then The Love Song of Queenie Hennessy and finally Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North does just that, as well as delighting by her assured story-telling. To read her work is to think at first you are being invited to a perfect and delicious afternoon tea - then realise that you are intimate communion with what it means to be human: to suffer, to love, and to be understood. There is beauty, and the reason for art.

—— Laline Paul

This short novel packs a big punch as Joyce paints an intimate portrait of fragility and grief, allowing us to experience unbearable pain but redemption too.

—— Vanessa Berridge , Daily Express

So beautiful, moving and tender. Rachel Joyce is our own Elizabeth Strout.

—— Nina Stibbe

This slim novella of barely 150 pages contains a world of emotion ... The kindness of strangers is Joyce's theme, as well as forgiveness and grief. No one writes difficult feelings better.

—— Wendy Holden , Daily Mail

Life-affirming. If you loved The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, make time to read this finale to the trilogy ... A touching tale about heartbreak and healing.

—— Good Housekeeping

A gorgeous read.

—— Anna Bonet , the i paper

Fry fans will delight in this tale of a redemptive journey and the kindness of strangers. A new Joyce. Rejoice anew!

—— Saga magazine

A real treat ... A story about belonging and understanding.

—— Nina Pottell , Prima

Rachel Joyce has a genius for creating the most damaged and difficult character and making us care deeply about their redemption. Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North is a powerful finale to her classic trilogy of heartbreak and healing.

—— Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures

At last it's Maureen's turn! It may only have the physical heft of a novella but Rachel Joyce's angry-sad latest packs the weight of a long marriage into the space of several well ironed handkerchiefs. Just brilliant.

—— Patrick Gale

Maureen Fry is wonderfully complex, flinty and closed and obsessive yet full of love and concern for others as she navigates her present and her past, carrying her terrible burdens of grief and guilt.
Rachel Joyce is deeply attuned to the complex rhythms of life and love and she sublimates this understanding, sentence by delicate, powerful, glistening sentence into an unforgettable story. It's beautiful all through, but the closing chapters are just astonishing, transcendent and hope-filled and life-affirming. I'll never forget this wonderful novel or the sunny, slightly teary day I spent reading it.

—— Donal Ryan

This book is short but very special. As fans of Rachel Joyce might expect, it's funny, touching and quite beautiful. It's also packed with wisdom about love and loss - and is sure to provide comfort to anyone who's known grief.

—— Matt Cain, author of The Secreet Life of Albert Entwistle

Maureen is so beautifully and unflinchingly portrayed - a complex contradiction of brittle and prickly with an underbelly of fragility and fear. Her journey - both physical and psychological - is compelling and profoundly moving and leaves the reader feeling fully satisfied and just a little lighter.

—— Ruth Hogan

In this slender, lyrical novel, Rachel Joyce offers a story as epic and encompassing as that wide-armed angel of the North. A journey of redemption, forgiveness and love. A journey you don't want to miss.

—— Helen Paris, author of Lost Property

Rachel Joyce writes with incredible depth, beauty and heart. Reading her prose is like listening to great music - sometimes soft and sweet, sometimes heart-rending, always beguiling. This is an emotional story about loss, resilience and reconciliation. Maureen Fry is a prickly kind of star... but wow, how she shines!

—— Hazel Prior, author of Call of the Penguins

Beautifully written and endlessly touching, Rachel Joyce once again captures what it means to be human in the final book of her wonderful trilogy.

—— Phaedra Patrick

Maureen is the sort of person we pass in the street every day, every hour, and probably give little thought to. She is difficult perhaps, a little brittle, unable to engage successfully with the world, and maybe hard to warm to - an embattled figure often lost against the vast opera of life. But Rachel allows us to see into her complex universe, feel first-hand her fears, the profound longing, the grim phantoms of the past, the ordered rebelliousness, and strange, dark sense of humour - and of shame. This story also happens to tie three life-affirming, vital and unpredictable novels together into a perfect, never-ending dance..

—— Damian Dibben, author of The Colour Storm

This is a deceptively simple story of love, forgiveness, fulfilment and hope. I can't think of any other novelist quite as tender and compassionate as Rachel Joyce, who understands that miracle of transformation when human fragility becomes strength of spirit.

—— Bel Mooney

This is a fitting and deeply moving end to the trilogy of Harold Fry. A portrait of a woman adrift in grief, it is as fragile as a songbird and just as beautiful.

—— Sarah Winman

Profoundly moving and deeply human, this story of self-discovery and forgiveness is essential reading. I loved every word.

—— Bonnie Garmus

I adored Harold & Queenie, but who knew Maureen waited in the wings to steal my heart? A testament to just how exquisitely Rachel Joyce understands people, and written with kindness and such perception. I can't recommend it enough.

—— Joanna Cannon

I was enthralled from the first page of this short, powerful book. Maureen is a wonderful, frustrating character--so rigid, and so frightened of what she might learn about herself and her own past. We all have some Maureen inside us, and so the journey we take with her across England and into her own personal tumult is a satisfying, visceral one.

—— Ann Napolitano

Astonishingly powerful... Truly stunning

—— Ruth Jones

Book of the Month

—— SAGA MAGAZINE

Atkinson's latest fictional treat is packed with intrigue... one can never underestimate the pleasurable power of [her] ability to stud her narrative with humor

—— BOSTON GLOBE

An absorbing tale

—— SUNDAY EXPRESS

The latest novel from an author who never lets you down

—— READER'S DIGEST

This terrific novel is alternately hilarious and sad

—— Upfront

It may change your life

—— The Observer

Pearson is a very witty and moving writer. Her prose is spare and skilful...waspish truisms and spot-on social observations

—— Daily Express

Intelligent, witty and of-the-moment, it mixes sassy, brittle perceptions with barefaced sentimentality

—— The Herald, Glasgow

Brilliantly captures and defines the mood of the moment...sparkling wit and razor sharp insights

—— XW Magazine

Sharply observed and frequently funny

—— Evening Standard

The success of the story - and a success it is - comes not from the ingenious scientific speculations, nor the shrewd literary connections (on the "emotional telepathy" of a work of art, or Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon), but the human story between father and son, as Theo finds out 'how my brain learns to resemble what it loves

—— The Critic

Richard Powers's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is both brutal and heartwarming, intimate and profound. A masterfully curated story of love, grief and loneliness, quietly building to an inevitable and devastating close

—— Press Association

He composes some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever read. I'm in awe of his talent

—— Oprah Winfrey

In Bewilderment, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist has crafted a story of great beauty and power

—— Business Post
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