Tempus fugit. It is one of the preoccupations in the peony of poems contained in the Faber

Tempus fugit, (Latin for time flies), reminds one of the staple cinematic device of calendar pages a blowin’ in the wind to mark the passage of time. Calendars are the flighty, flirty bosom buddy if not kith and kin to the more steady diary, both now somewhat quaint in this digital age.

For cold, hard appointment keeping, one’s tablet or phone is perfectly adequate. However for concise elegance in date data, THE FABER & FABER POETRY DIARY 2016 is an appointment application par excellence.

Stationery meets the literary in this handsomely bound volume that will adorn any desk or handbag.

Here beside each page of weekly assignations, seven days to the page, sits one page of peerless poetry, or a facsimile of a Faber poetry cover from it’s near ninety year catalogue.

Fifty two weeks featuring forty poets, from the past to the present, from W.H. Auden to W.B. Yeats, each of them inspirational, all of them greats.

Tempis fugit is conjured in If I Could Tell You by W.H. Auden for the Week commencing May 16…

“Time will say nothing but I told you so.,..

Will time say nothing but I told you so?

If I could tell you I would let you know”.

2016 is the year of the monkey but Sam Riviere’s Year Of The Rabbit gets a guernsey for the start of June, with it’s opening lines –

“There is no purer form of advertising

Than writing a poem”.

Instead of or in accompaniment to the desk calendar with their flip pages of flip aphorism, THE FABER & FABER POETRY DIARY 2016 endows a weekly serve of superb writing, a week spent with Shelley, Smith, Plath or Shakespeare.

Shared days with Dunn, Dickinson and Donne, give way to weeks with W.H. and Wordsworth, and months with Larkin, Burns, Cummings, Marvel and Tennyson.

Here’s a year with Hughes, Hardy, Hopkins and Heaney, an annual with the perennial Eliot, Plath and Pound.

Apart from the glorious poetry, there are reproductions of famous covers from the Faber stable.

Practical in its calendars, flagging of important days, space for entries and end-note pages, THE FABER & FABER POETRY DIARY 2016 is an excellent primer of past and present poetry, a daily dose of dipping into the familiar or discovering exponents that will inspire and ignite the emotions and imagination.

Pressed for something practical yet personal and elegant for a Christmas gift, THE FABER & FABER POETRY DIARY 2016 warrants so much more than merely your consideration, a treasure at the very modest recommended retail price of $24.99.