Books to give you hope: Staying Alive – Real Poems for Unreal Times

In a rotten year, when public language has been poisoned by politics and prejudice, the personal integrity of poetry can keep us going

• Why we’re writing about books to give you hope this summer

“Hope springs eternal”, declared Alexander Pope in 1733. More than ever this year have I needed hope – and I found it, nestled in the pages of poetry.

Earlier this summer, a word was hurled at me on the street by a stranger: “Leave.” Only one syllable and a second long, but it stayed with me. It was the day after the EU referendum results and in the two months since, racist incidents have been rising across the UK. Language itself seems to have been hijacked by toxic political discourse: small words such as “leave”, “immigrant”, “democracy”, “decent”, “human”, and “real” have taken on sinister meanings.