I was standing outside an apartment block that had been split apart by a missile. The words of a poem came to me when I could no longer find my own.

In nearly four decades as a journalist covering conflict from Palestine to Kosovo to Rwanda, Channel 4 News International Editor Lindsey Hilsum has always carried a book of poetry. It helps her make sense of the senseless, salve her soul as the world around her rages, and remember those she has met in the darkest of times.

In Ukraine, she tweeted a poem a day, and people began to read, to share, to ask for more. Here, Lindsey collects her favourite poems from ancient times to modern, translated from different languages and by writers from all around the world. Alongside each, she recalls a memory from her own work, whether interviewing the warlords of Bosnia and Sudan, meeting child soldiers in Uganda or giving testimony about the genocide in Rwanda. Her prose reveals comic absurdity and astonishing courage, meaning and its absence, unexpected moments of love and the untold consequences that come long after most cameras disperse. She explores the pity of war – and its fatal attraction.

Vital, authentic, a read like no other, this is the first account Lindsey has written of her experience, accompanied by the voices of poets through the ages who have fought, witnessed terror or fled their homes, yet found the words to capture their humanity.