Quote of the day

"Poetry has been defined as the imagination pressing back against the pressures of reality, and these poems from Guantanamo are a vivid proof of the rightness of that definition. Here are voices crying de profundis, yet the very fact of this articulation constitutes a victory, a guarantee of the spirit's indomitable aspiration towards freedome and justice."

Seamus Heaney on this book of poems written by prisoners detained in Guantanamo Bay and edited by Marc Falkoff, an attorney to many of the contributors. In some cases the poems were written in toothpaste or etched into Styrofoam coffee cups.

But of course poetry is a minority literary form, a dying art, unimportant and irrelevant to the modern world...