To the Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poems

Edited by Carol Ann Duffy.

In the year that sees the 40th anniversary of the moon landings – an illustrated book that celebrates our timeless fascination with the moon.

There's something incredibly moving, and electrifying, to read a poem from the Chinese Book of Odes, written around 500 B.C, and to feel both our distance from and our closeness to the past, and the moon itself:

I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed,
I saw him coming on the southern road.
My heart lays down its load.

In collecting together poems such as these – poems that span continents and centuries – To The Moon shows what it is to be human; to love, to lose, to dream and to hope. The poems it contains give us a real and profound sense of our time on this planet, and the pleasures they offer are – like space itself – infinite.