Today I received this email and am passing it on to you:
I'm writing to let you know about The Book Of Hopes And Dreams. It's a charity, poetry anthology, published to raise money for the Medical Aid (Afghanistan) appeal of the Glasgow-based charity Spirit Aid, (an entirely volunteer run organisation, headed by Scottish actor and director, David Hayman).
As a volunteer organisation, Spirit Aid are able to ensure that 90% of all the funds they raise go straight to the projects they are involved in (unlike most of the bigger charities whose admin and advertising budgets swallow huge percentages of all donations).
The Book Of Hopes And Dreams, which is a celebration of the human spirit (even in times of great adversity) has captured the imagination and hearts of some of the greatest living poets of our times; all of whom have freely contributed work to this anthology.
There are contributions from Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Heath-Stubbs, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, Tony Harrison, Alasdair Gray, Edwin Morgan, Penelope Shuttle, Anne Stevenson, Jon Stallworthy, Alan Brownjohn, Ruth Fainlight, David Constantine, Moniza Alvi, Cyril Dabydeen, Elaine Feinstein, Vicki Feaver, Michael Horovitz, Tom Leonard, Robert Mezey, Lawrence Sail, Jay Ramsay, Charles Ades Fishman, Geoffrey Godbert and Ian Duhig, amongst others.
The book costs £9.99 ($20 US) and can be ordered in all high street bookstores in the UK. It can also be bought outside the UK via the publisher, Bluechrome or from UK Amazon.
We truly believe it is one of the best anthologies to have been published this century. Not only is it brimming over with the work of award winning poets, it's message is resoundingly positive and optimistic in outlook, which many will find refreshing, given the zeitgeist for poet-modern irony, ennui and despair.
More importantly, royalties from every copy sold will go towards providing mobile clinics, doctors, nurses and medicines for the people of the far flung, mountainous region of Baglan in North East Afghanistan, where the population hadn't received any medical care whatsoever for 25 years, until Spirit Aid raised funds for their first mobile clinic.
In reality, at least six mobile clinics are needed to provide even basic medical care for the people of Baglan. With your help Spirit Aid will get closer to making that a reality.
I hope you will consider buying this book, because it really will help to save lives. It will also help to improve the quality of peoples' lives. And who knows, with its uplifting tone, it may even improve the quality of your life or inspire your own writing endeavours. Mike Matthews, one of the contributors wrote me recently and said: "The anthology is fantastic, and it has served as a major inspiration for me to continue to write every single day, for the poetry in it is genuinely high quality and uplifting. I have not been able to stop writing since it came out, and I carry it around with me everywhere, opening it before every writing session."
I also hope that you will help spread the word about the book. If you are inspired to do so I have several suggestions of ways you might do so, all of them simple, and none too time consuming:
Give the book a mention or a review in your blog
BUY THE BOOK and add a hotlink to http://www.rimbaud.org.uk/bookofhope.html on your website and/or blog.
Thanks very much for all your support.
All the best,
Dee Rimbaud
ps: You can find out more about Spirit Aid by checking out their website at http://www.spiritaid.org.uk
You can read David Hayman's account of his involvement in distributing medical aid to villages in Baglan province by clicking on The Book Of Hopes And Dreams section of my website, which is at http://www.thunderburst.co.uk
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