Charles Darwin described tears as that "special expression of man's," and it is still widely held that we are the only species that cries in grief or sorrow. The father-and-son team of Anthony and Ben Holden partner with Amnesty International to gather Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, an extraordinary anthology of famous men telling us about the one poem that can make them cry, along with the poems themselves.
The 100 grown men the Holdens call upon are quite a group, from John le Carré, Stanley Tucci, Kenneth Branagh and Chris Cooper to Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, James Earl Jones and Patrick Stewart. British verse is strongly represented: Auden is the most tear-inducing poet, with five poems; Housman, Hardy and Larkin are close behind, with three each. Five contributors even selected the same poems (including Christina Rossetti's "Remember" and Housman's "Last Poems XI"). Billy Collins tears up at Victoria Redel's "Bedecked," while J.J. Abrams sniffles at Collins's "The Lanyard," which "gripped me in a way that poetry never had before."
This collection is about the emotional power of art, and the Holdens cast aside any accusations of sentimentality or mawkishness. Anyone who reads Poems That Make Grown Men Cry will be roused, disturbed and exalted by the poems selected. As Seamus Heaney says of his Thomas Hardy selection: "The tear ducts do congest when I read 'The Voice.' " Sentimentality, indeed. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher