Lucille Lang Day's favorite poetry books for discovering your place in the universe

“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).”

I first heard these words from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman at a Berkeley Poets Cooperative workshop in 1972. I was intrigued and had to read Whitman’s work myself! Up until this point, my primary influences as a poet had been the Romantics (especially Keats, Shelley, and Byron), Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Whitman was a revelation. He showed me not only that a poet could write in an entirely different way, but also that an individual can encompass and represent vastness. When Whitman reveals his name in “Song of Myself,” he includes the whole universe in a single breath: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos.” 

Sylvia Plath created an important body of poetry although she committed suicide at age 30.

After hearing about her work in the 1970s, I looked for her books and read all of them before The Collected Poems came out in 1981. Her images were indeed amazing, and they made me look at the world more closely: “The pears fatten like little buddhas. / A blue mist is dragging the lake.”

Even more importantly, she wrote honestly about undesirable mental states like depression: “People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.” I admired her willingness to share her sorrow, anger, and jealousy, turning negative moods into art, and I wanted to bring such candor into my own poetry.

An abundance of gorgeous images and philosophical insights!

Who else would write “The sparrow gleans and prims among the icy / weeds, hardly noticing, as if she knew / she were not merely herself, not pulse, / not marrow, not throbbing, but an eternal / equation of motion relative to belief”?

Pattiann Rogers always astounds me with her specific, concrete images and knowledge of science, as well as the philosophical insights that seem to spring organically from the poem itself.

I began following Rogers when her first book, The Expectations of Light, came out in 1982. I felt so close to her poems that I wished I’d written them myself, and I have been feasting on her books, including Song of the World Becoming, ever since.

Lisa Rosenberg’s background as a physicist and space program engineer informs poems that probe the beauties and mysteries of existence.

I first encountered her work in 2022 when she read in the Virtual STEM Poetry Series sponsored by Farmingdale State College in New York. Her poems are vivid, juxtaposing biology and cosmology: “The aster blooms. The supernova cools.” They are also rich in sound repetitions (“blooms,” “cools”) and musicality.

In Weeds and Stars, Rosenberg both invents new poetic forms and makes existing ones—like the sonnet, prose poem, villanelle, pantoum, and cento—her own. Her book came out in 2026 and is therefore a relative, not an ancestor, of my own poetry. In fact, Rosenberg’s poems and mine share some common ancestors, including Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath. 

In the title poem of Mega-Galaxies, Coleman compares galaxies weighing a billion times more than our sun to individual humans lined up side by side in their boxes in a Zoom meeting.

Think about that: we each contain the limitlessness of the universe! This reminds me of Walt Whitman, who called himself “a kosmos.” I first discovered Coleman’s poetry in 2019 when the anthology she edited, HERE: Poems for the Planet, was published, and I immediately recognized her as a kindred poet.

She is concerned with both understanding the universe and preserving the ecosystems of Earth—all the interrelated plants, animals, and microorganisms, both the humble and the magnificent.

Mega-Galaxies is a slender volume; I look forward to reading more of Coleman’s work.