David Whyte

Whyte is an English-born poet living in the American Pacific Northwest who worked as a naturalist guide in the Galápagos and in Nepal before writing full time, and holds a degree in marine zoology. Consolations takes ordinary words, courage, honesty, ambition, disappointment, and gives each a short essay, and it reaches a great many readers who would not open a book of poems. He built an unusual career reading poetry to corporations and speaking about working life, which some poets object to publicly; his answer is that the need is where the audience is.