Books like Poems 1962-2012

Human creativity is on full peacock feathers out display with this one.

The story is laid out as a series of postcards and letters written between two people. Many of them are letters, on separate pieces of paper tucked inside envelopes that are inside the book. This one will be over the head of younger kids but because of the interactive nature, the colorful pictures, and the solve-a-mystery vibe of the story it could be a fun one to read with slightly older kids. 

For me, I started it one night with my six-year-old and then continued to dig through the letters on the floor next to their bed long after they fell asleep. It feels voyeuristic reading through it. Who are these people? What’s inside this next envelope? Do they know I am reading their letters? It’s clever as hell and a lot of fun to read.

I grew up in an Italian family where the wisdom of my elders poured from ocean voyages. At family gatherings my relatives spoke of chaperoned romances, ice trucks, and cinematic stories that went on and on.

Peggy Freydberg’s image, the lined flesh conveying time’s signature, is what first drew me in. When I learned she began writing poetry at 90, I was curious and immediately humbled after diving into her work. Here was a woman in fierce-writing shape and in physical command of a powerful voice. She was brutally honest about life, aging, and death.

Her poems remain gritty, defiant, elegant, and sad. She passed at 107, and I still imagine the words she’d yet to write. I keep Ms. Freydberg’s memory and her brave words close to my heart.

As a small child, I’d felt as alone as a moon in a blank sky.

While my classroom mind collected daydreams, I often missed what the adult in the room was saying. I spent too much time not following directions. I always wanted to prove I was as strong as any boy. My kindergarten teacher had recommended that I repeat the year. My parents decided I should move on. For a long while, fitting-in had felt like sand in my eyes until I discovered Geranium. The words and the fantastical illustrations knew me.

This book taught me to cope by using my words and my art. So, I found Geranium when I was eight, or it found me, and it has been with me ever since. 

Four-legged girl begins with a powerful cover image and ends with the equally evocative “four-legged girl.” Captivating and curious.

I own several Diane Seuss collections, but this one (her third) is my favorite. Seuss bares the train wrecks in a way I admire and strive to emulate. Her lines crash, her images explode – I’m reading but can’t stop the comet crashing to earth, or sometimes earth is crashing into the comet – either way, Ms. Seuss, a former therapist, doesn’t do faux redemption like I so often do out of guilt for happy endings. Her frank language catapults. She confesses, critiques, includes me in her world and excludes pity of any kind.

Her poetry pushes me, in the best way possible, to smash every crayon in my secret box. 

What’s distinctive about this gorgeous poetry anthology is not only that each poem has a specific tree or flower as its subject but that they are grouped according to plant family.

The editor Sarah Maguire was a gardener as well as a poet and translator. In what was clearly a labour of love she brought together poems from all over the world, spanning eight centuries of writing. Her fascinating introduction considers many aspects of nature poetry, including gender and colonialism.

As a gardener and poet I have loved finding poems by Medbh McGuckian, Emily Dickinson and D.H. Lawrence grouped together in the Gentian family or poems by Louise Glück, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, Robert Herrick, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur thriving next to each other in the Mint family. 

Even if you don’t want to be a poet, there’s something about playing with poetic form that I think is useful to any writer because it enables you to explore the use of rhythm, metaphor, simile and other ways of honing your consciousness into literary and written form. It demands specificity of description and uniqueness of voice, and Kate Clanchy’s book - she is herself a published poet, writer but also a teacher - gets to the nub of it through examples and exercise, to emerge a more fluent and confident writer, and in whichever form you choose.

An extraordinary gem of a booklet that considers the many ways that four lines of a single poem, composed by an 8th century Chinese Buddhist, have been translated into modern idiom. It is amazing how a mere twenty ideograms, depicting a mountain and forest scene devoid of people, can illuminate the variety and subtlety of consciousness. I recommend the 2016 edition with additional translations.

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 man walking down the Pennine Way, from Kirk Yetholm to Edale, mostly on his own but sometimes with some other people. In early summer, the reasonably dry early summer of 2010.

The difference is that he's doing it without any money at all, relying on the kindness of strangers to put a few bob in an old sock. The other difference: he was the UK's future Poet Laureate. 

Marilyn Nelson’s poetry is staggeringly good, particularly the way she writes formal poems—sonnets!—in a humble voice, like her sonnet “From an Alabama Farmer.” Nelson’s poem “To the Confederate Dead,” with its epigraph by Allen Tate is a better poem than Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” with which it is in conversation. Nelson’s ‘wreath’ of sonnets, “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” is simply sublime.