There’s something incredibly moving, and electrifying, to read a poem from the Chinese Book of Odes, written around 500 BC, and to feel both our distance from and our closeness to the past, and the Moon itself:

I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed,

I saw him coming on the southern road.

My heart lays down its load.

In collecting together poems such as these – poems that span continents and centuries – To the Moon shows what it is to be human; to love, to lose, to dream and to hope. The poems it contains give us a real and profound sense of our time on this planet, and the pleasures they offer are – like space itself – infinite.’