Here are 100 books that Collected Poems, 1951-1975 fans have personally recommended if you like
Collected Poems, 1951-1975.
Book DNA is a community of 13,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I love to see complicated characters rising to the occasion. People in real life generally have a lot going on just handling the day-to-day, and they aren’t waiting around for adventure, romance, or mystery to find them. It feels very human to me to see characters struggling with more mundane things like social situations, worrying about their appearance, or holding down a job, rather than only focusing on the plot arc, and that’s the type of character I also focus on as a writer. My latest protagonist, Simon, definitely has enough problems without a missing-person case to solve, so he may be what got me thinking of this topic.
I have always loved literary thriller queen Daphne Du Maurier's complex and resilient characters, and Mary Yellan is no exception. Everything’s looking pretty miserable for her after her mother’s death forces her to give up the family farm and her hometown to live in a creepy inn with her miserable aunt and aggressive drunk of an uncle.
So I really enjoy how brave and resourceful she is in getting past violence, danger, miserable living conditions, a desolate setting, and bad taste in men to find out whether something more sinister than smuggling is going on at the empty inn.
After the death of her mother, Mary Yellan crosses the windswept Cornish moors to Jamaica Inn, the home of her Aunt Patience. There she finds Patience a changed woman, downtrodden by her domineering, vicious husband Joss Merlyn. The inn is a front for a lawless gang of criminals, and Mary is unwillingly dragged into their dangerous world of smuggling and murder. Before long she will be forced to cross her own moral line to save herself.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I love to write about the places, folklore, nature, and above all the magic of Cornwall. I have lived in Cornwall most of my life, I learned to crawl along the rockpools of Cornish beaches and I went to school in a moorland village. Now, I live on the edge of Bodmin Moor and write in the Cornish wilds, I live close to both the moors and the sea. I began writing for Cornish folklore project Mazed in 2013 and I have been retelling Cornish Folk Tales and writing poetry and stories inspired by Cornish folklore ever since.
Ninety-year-old Marvellous is a river goddess, her whole being is immersed in a Cornish creek, she lives in a caravan beside the water and loves a swim.
Marvellous lives on in my imagination. Nature is an organic part of the novel, time and seasons move with the tide; the reader knows it is spring because the ransoms (wild garlic) are out. I love rivers, they wind their way into my own writing, West Looe River is often my muse as a poet.
I met Sarah Winman when I stumbled upon her book signing at my local bookshop. I only had enough money to buy Marvellous Ways or shoes to wear to an awards ceremony that evening. I realized no one would notice my old shoes so I bought the book and loved every page.
A YEAR OF MARVELLOUS WAYS is the unforgettable and completely captivating new novel from Sarah Winman, author of the international bestseller WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT.
Marvellous Ways is eighty-nine years old and has lived alone in a remote Cornish creek for nearly all her life. Lately she's taken to spending her days sitting on a mooring stone by the river with a telescope. She's waiting for something - she's not sure what, but she'll know it when she sees it.
Drake is a young soldier left reeling by the Second World War. When his promise to fulfil a dying…
I love to write about the places, folklore, nature, and above all the magic of Cornwall. I have lived in Cornwall most of my life, I learned to crawl along the rockpools of Cornish beaches and I went to school in a moorland village. Now, I live on the edge of Bodmin Moor and write in the Cornish wilds, I live close to both the moors and the sea. I began writing for Cornish folklore project Mazed in 2013 and I have been retelling Cornish Folk Tales and writing poetry and stories inspired by Cornish folklore ever since.
Cornish Folk Tales takes the reader on a journey into the heart of Cornish Storytelling.
I have listened to Mike O’Connor many times and he is a master storyteller. I love the Cornish Droll telling tradition; droll tellers went from place to place telling tales for a bed and a bite to eat. The narrators of Cornish Folk Tales, blind droll teller Anthony James and his guide young Jamie are a perfect combination.
Mike O’Connor, through Anthony tells the tales with anecdotes, music, history, and Cornish language. This book taught me how to approach folklore retelling in an accessible way.
Reading I felt myself beside the firesides of Cornwall, listening to tales of dragons, mermaids, giants, and saints; puzzling over riddles, and learning about Cornish traditions and music
The ancient land of Cornwall is steeped in mysterious tradition, proud heritage and age-old folklore. Before books were widely available, wandering 'droll tellers' used to spread Cornish insight and humour to all parts of the Duchy - exchanging their tales for food and shelter. Anthony James was one such droll teller, and this collection follows him as he makes his way around Cornwall one glorious summer. Richly illustrated with hand-drawn images and woodcuts, Cornish Folk Tales will appeal to anyone captivated by this beautiful land and its resident kindly giants, mischievous piskeys, seductive mermaids, bold knights and barnacle-encrusted sea captains.
I love to write about the places, folklore, nature, and above all the magic of Cornwall. I have lived in Cornwall most of my life, I learned to crawl along the rockpools of Cornish beaches and I went to school in a moorland village. Now, I live on the edge of Bodmin Moor and write in the Cornish wilds, I live close to both the moors and the sea. I began writing for Cornish folklore project Mazed in 2013 and I have been retelling Cornish Folk Tales and writing poetry and stories inspired by Cornish folklore ever since.
Enys Tregarthen’s tales have bought Cornish magic into every home for a hundred years.
I have spent a lot of time with her books and retold many tales in my book. North Cornwall Fairies and Legends is a basket full of piskeys, (the Cornish fairy folk.) One of my favourites is the Piskey’s Revenge, which I retold for Cornish storytelling project Mazed. It is illustrated by Steven Lambert, and used in Cornishibai street storytelling.
It tells how Granfer accidentally digs up the piskey beds, in revenge, the piskeys eat all Granfer’s birthday biscuits. Enys writes about the children of Cornwall and what they encounter: they meet piskey friends up on the moors, little stone figures come alive in towns and aways there is an excuse for piskey mischief.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank…
For my first 18 years, I slept in the same room (opposite my parents) in the same house (116 Monticello Avenue) in the same city (Piedmont) in the same state (CA) in the same country (USA), but soon after leaving for college in Evanston, IL, I pined for elsewhere and ended up peripatetic. That peripateticness plagued me, as a woman/wife/mother. While growing our family, my French husband and I moved: Israel to France to California to New York to Israel to New York to Israel. Finally, in my early fifties, I understood home is more about who you are than where you live.
This book combines compressed prose with nonfiction truth-telling but it isn’t linear or a complete story as much as a snapshot of Fennelly’s childhood, home life, and keen observations.
This book showed me that the quality of writing trumps the quantity of words. Short and sparse, when well written, can find a place on a bookshelf and shine.
The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of non-fiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer and deeply original observer of life's challenges and joys.
Some pieces are wistful, some wry and many reveal the humour buried in our everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments and awakens us…
I’ve loved words from the moment I met them. I wrote my first poem when I was eight years old and haven’t stopped yet! As a children’s book author, I love incorporating rhyme, poetry, or lyrical prose in the stories I write. I was a shy kid and often felt like my poetry wasn’t “good enough.” It is my goal to get kids excited about all forms of poetry and I want them to know that they can be poets if they want to and that writing, reading, and sharing poetry is fun and rewarding.
Like Daniel, young kids may have heard the word “poetry,” but what exactly is a poem?
The collage illustrations will draw you in as Daniel takes a walk through the park asking creatures, “what is poetry,” the spider answers, saying, "to me poetry is when morning dew glistens.” Or maybe it’s “moonlight on the grass.” Daniel finds that poetry is different things to different animals, and he learns that to find his poem all he has to do is look around and listen. A perfect introduction to poetry!
Stunning collage art full of rich color, glorious details, and a sense of wonder—reminiscent of the work of Ezra Jack Keats—illustrate this delightful story celebrating the poetry found in the world around us.
What is poetry? Is it glistening morning dew? Spider thinks so. Is it crisp leaves crunching? That’s what Squirrel says. Could it be a cool pond, sun-warmed sand, or moonlight on the grass? Maybe poetry is all of these things, as it is something special for everyone—you just have to take the time to really look and listen. The magical thing is that poetry is in…
An Heir of Realms tells the tale of two young heroines—a dragon rider and a portal jumper—who fight dragon-like parasites to save their realms from extinction.
Rhoswen is training as a Realm Rider to work with dragons and burn away the Narxon swarming into her realm. Rhoswen’s dream is to…
After building a career as a women’s magazine editor, I left my job in the midst of a complicated and life-altering experience with infertility. Throughout those years I longed for connection—to other women who knew this specific pain, but also back to the person I'd always known myself to be. Infertility had stolen me from myself. The books on this list are not about infertility; rather, they speak to what it means to be a human who is enduring. For anyone feeling lost or despairing on an agonizing road to parenthood, I believe these are the books to light the way back home.
When you're living in the sterile, gleaming world of a fertility clinic, I’m not sure there’s a more inviting landscape to disappear into than the poetry of Mary Oliver.
I find something so moving and hopeful—almost meditative—in the lyricism of her language and the beauty with which she renders the natural world. What a lovely place to live, even for a few hours or a few pages.
I actually considered borrowing a line from one of these poems for the title of my book.
A New York Times Bestseller, chosen as Oprah's "Books That Help Me Through" for Oprah's Book Club
"No matter where one starts reading, Devotions offers much to love, from Oliver's exuberant dog poems to selections from the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Primitive, and Dream Work, one of her exceptional collections. Perhaps more important, the luminous writing provides respite from our crazy world and demonstrates how mindfulness can define and transform a life, moment by moment, poem by poem." -The Washington Post
"It's as if the poet herself has sidled beside the reader and pointed us to the poems she considers most…
I am a British poet living in the Peak District in Derbyshire, which is perhaps why I can’t stop the natural world from coming into my poems. My writing shed at the top of the garden looks out over a field and up to a limestone outcrop with a stand of beech trees. When there are no poems, I sit and watch the birds and wait for the sheep to trundle down the hill at the end of the afternoon. I read poems about nature because those are the ones I love best–poems that might capture something I’ve noticed but that put it into a beautiful and startling new language.
I love this dazzlingly original collection, which evokes a childhood in rural Cumbria. Jackself is the title character, but there are plenty of other Jacks in the poems, too – Jacks from nursery rhymes and folklore and English legend.
Jackself is a mostly solitary boy, and the poems take us into the strange, funny, frightening world of a child who lives on the edge of nature, sometimes seeming to become a feral creature himself. I was struck by the startlingly wild and fearless imagery of the poems, which make the natural world a darkly compelling place.
Jackself is the fourth collection from one of Britain's finest poets, and sees Jacob Polley at the height of his powers. In one of the most original books of poetry to appear in the last decade, Jackself spins a kind of 'fictionalized autobiography' through nursery rhymes, riddles and cautionary tales, and through the many 'Jacks' of our folktale, legend, phrase and fable - everyman Jacks and no one Jacks, Jackdaw, Jack-O-Lantern, Jack Sprat, Cheapjack and Jack Frost. At once playful and terrifying, lyric and narratively compelling, Jackself is an unforgettable exploration…
I am a scholar of international politics and history who has taught in Northern Uganda, spent years interviewing political and military elites in Congo, Eritrea, and Sudan, and worked on climate agriculture and water in Ethiopia and Somalia. In my work on the continent and at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia University, I try not only to understand the material realities that define the options available to diverse African communities but also the ideas, in all their potential and contradictions, that give shape to how African societies interact internally and engage the outside world. I hope the books on this list will inspire you as much as they did for me.
If some books inspire a rethink of recent history through hundreds of pages of forensic evidence or rigorous theory, Emtithal Mahmoud’s poetry recasts big questions that African societies have struggled with by weaving together hard-hitting metaphors and stunning phrases to open up new worlds of possibility and loss.
I find Emi’s writing an incredible call for solidarity, compassion, and the shattering of barriers—whether through the tender or the raw, the unspeakable or the gushing, the blistering and the comforting. A set of poems I return to regularly for perspective, whether on personal dilemmas, the contraptions of unity and division, or the political currency of love and othering.
2015 World Poetry Slam Champion and Woman of the World co-Champion Emtithal "Emi" Mahmoud presents her hauntingly beautiful debut poetry collection.
Brimming with rage, sorrow, and resilience, this collection traverses an expansive terrain: genocide; diaspora; the guilt of surviving; racism and Islamophobia; the burdens of girlhood; the solace of sisterhood; the innocence of a first kiss. Heart-wrenching and raw, defiant and empowering, Sisters' Entrance explores how to speak the unspeakable.
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I’ve always been preternaturally attentive to the way words work—as components of meaning, but also as visual, aural, and functional objects with their own erratic behaviors. Since joining the Oulipo in 2009, I’ve had even more occasion to think and talk about how those behaviors can be pointed in a literary direction, and to recognize successful experiments when I read them.
A bracing slap to the face, this book. Or maybe a punch to the gut. The conceit is the series of portraits of hoarders based on the reality show of the same name, and the recipe is to combine their testimonials—“I save old soda cans and turn the tin snips into flowers,” say, or “I want desperately to change”—with lists of objects, described as though in a slow camera pan across a filthy room. But the alchemy is the way Durbin mashes the two together, not quite at random but not correctlyeither. It’s a harrowing litany of fragments, so specific that the unspoken point is all too clear: what’s broken is much bigger than any of these individual people or things.
A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021 An NPR Best Book of 2021 An Electric Literature Best Poetry Book of 2021 A Dennis Cooper Best Book of 2021
In Hoarders, Durbin deftly traces the associations between hoarding and collective US traumas rooted in consumerism and the environment. Each poem is a prismatic portrait of a person and the beloved objects they hoard, from Barbies to snow globes to vintage Las Vegas memorabilia to rotting fruit to plants. Using reality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects a cultural moment back to the reader…
