With Susie Dent, the lexicographer from Countdown, he co-hosts the award-winning podcast, Something Rhymes with Purple.

Dancing By The Light of The Moon - Penguin Books Australia Dancing By The Light of The Moon - Penguin Books Australia

In Dancing by the Light of the Moon you will find a remarkable collection of the best-loved poems in the English-speaking world.A. Milne * Maya AngelouBenjamin Zephaniah * Monty PythonCarol Ann Duffy * Oscar WildCelia Johnson * Roald DahlD. I should probably be nice about this book because Gyles Brandreth is a big promoter of poetry and I'm an aspiring poet. Sims (the highest-paid journalist of his day, who wrote the ballad Christmas Day in the Workhouse) and Jeremiah Brandreth (the last man in England to be beheaded for treason). It was an interesting concept of learning poetry to keep your brain ticking over - worth thinking about! I’ve been slowly reading it now for months and it’s going to become one of my life long favourite books.

Dancing By The Light of The Moon By Gyles Brandreth | Used

I am visual and enjoy the imagery, metaphors and alliteration found in poetry, I like the way you can dip into and out of a poetry book, revisiting old favourites and discovering new gems. Brandreth provides over 400 pages of top-notch poems by everyone from Shakespeare to Simon Armitage. His great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Brandreth, promoted ‘Brandreth’s Pills’ (a medicine that cured everything! In Dancing by the Light of the Moon we have a remarkable collection of over 250 best-loved poems in the English-speaking world. I will begin with the poems I liked that are familiar to me (I’m not cheating as I only remember the first few lines but it’s a start!

Gyles Brandreth is in practice one such candidate, who gives the listeners of various podcasts his favourite poems. By savouring, memorising and sharing these poems we can begin to increase literacy rates, which are at an all-time low, while enriching our lives with the joy of language. Lovely book that I can see holding onto forever and referring/learning the poems throughout my life. A collection of over 250 of our nations best-loved poems to read, relish and recite, handpicked by Gyles Brandreth .

Dancing By The Light of The Moon (Book) - by Gyles Brandreth Dancing By The Light of The Moon (Book) - by Gyles Brandreth

Brandreth explains the benefits of learning poetry by heart, gives lots of tips on how to achieve this and then peppers the book with some gorgeous examples to learn. And for all of that, even though there are a lot of nonsense poems and more “funny” poetry than I can cope with, this is definitely a top 5 anthology for me.

Now for the challenge of learning some poetry by heart with the new found strategies - the 2 lines of my first poem are in my pocket! Learning poems may help keep dementia at bay, so reading this book has made me determined to do just that.

Dancing by the Light of the Moon : Gyles Daubeney Brandreth

This particular edition has an epilogue following the onset of the COVID pandemic, with additional poems written during lockdowns and anecdotes about how many people found poetry comforting during this stressful and lonely time. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. my wife said she saw me walking along the street talking to myself, I explained that actually I was reciting ‘I wondered lonely as s cloud’ by Wordsworth and felt very smug! Instead of being fussy about the rhyming scheme or line breaks, having read 200+ English poems in under a week, I have changed.

Like Charon rowing Aeneas across the Lethe, Gyles takes the reader by the hand and shows them marvellous things. Allow Gyles Brandreth to be your guide to not only the wonders of poetry - and there are many - but also its practical uses in everyday life.