Formerly from Yorkshire, Wales and Ireland, David Whyte now makes his home on Whidbey Island in the Pacific Northwest. He is one of very few poets to bring his insights to bear on organizational life, as borne out in his earlier book, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. If you’ve ever wondered about soul in organizations, poetry and work, the poetics of living one’s truth with others, and the significance of our own artistic truths in this world, that book will feed such wonder well.

David Whyte, through his own Many Rivers Press, publishes his poetry books, and the care and depth in his work is reflected well in the handsome book design. The House of Belonging is a fine and surprisingly fathomless book to hold in one’s hands. Here are poems in four sections: “Belonging to the House,” “Belonging to the Night,” “Belonging to Places,” and “Belonging to Those I Know.” Mercifully without introduction, notes, forewords, asides, or other interferences, these poems take us down, and through, and unpeel layers of heart in a resonant, instructive way.

This is the bright home

in which I live,

this is where I ask

my friends to come,

this is where I want

to love all the things

it has taken me so long

to learn to love.

This is the temple

of my adult aloneness

and I belong

to that aloneness

as I belong to my life.

There is no house

like the house of belonging.

David Whyte’s earlier books of poems include Songs for Coming Home, Where Many Rivers Meet, and Fire in the Earth. And his lovely CD, Close to Home, presents David sharing his poems with translucent music accompanying. A live reading of his work is an event much to be treasured. “This is not an age of information,” he says. “This is the time of loaves and fishes. People are hungry, and one good word is bread for a thousand.”

Our pilgrim journey

apart or together,

like

the thirst

of everything

to find its true form,

the grain of the wood

round the hatched knot

still

straightening

toward the light.