Here are 100 books that Poems 1962-2012 fans have personally recommended if you like
Poems 1962-2012.
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I make music. I write books. I’m drawn to scenarios in which people make music or books or art collaboratively, often spontaneously. I enjoy making music with kids because of how they can be creative spontaneously. Sometimes adults pretend to be creative in a way that a child might relate to, but a child can generally sniff out a pretender. And a pretend pretender can be unpleasant company for children and adults alike. These books were written by adults who know their inner child. Wonder, play and a tangential regard for social norms are their baseline to share the stories they’ve chosen to share.
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.
My childhood diary entries often turned into poems. Writing and art have been in my life a long while. After earning a BA in Advertising and Design, I became an art director for Prentice Hall, a large educational publisher. My reading tastes are eclectic. Reading the work of poets came to me later in life when poetry began oozing out my pores. I’ve maintained an art & writing blog since 2014. I self-published an illustrated collection of poetry in 2016. My work has been published in a variety of journals. Do check out the books on my list, they are unique, just like you.
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.
Peggy Freydberg is proof positive that creativity has no age limit! Just when most people are winding way down, Peggy began writing a lifetime's worth of poems at age 90! Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks describes Peggy's poetry as having a "stunning intensity and searing emotional impact." Edited by Laurie David, these poems will resonate with anyone who is trying to unravel life's questions about life, love, fear, aging, and loss. Peggy's beautiful poetry proves it's never too late to start writing and be discovered - even if you are 107 years old!
My childhood diary entries often turned into poems. Writing and art have been in my life a long while. After earning a BA in Advertising and Design, I became an art director for Prentice Hall, a large educational publisher. My reading tastes are eclectic. Reading the work of poets came to me later in life when poetry began oozing out my pores. I’ve maintained an art & writing blog since 2014. I self-published an illustrated collection of poetry in 2016. My work has been published in a variety of journals. Do check out the books on my list, they are unique, just like you.
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 Geraniumwhen I was eight, or it found me, and it has been with me ever since.
My childhood diary entries often turned into poems. Writing and art have been in my life a long while. After earning a BA in Advertising and Design, I became an art director for Prentice Hall, a large educational publisher. My reading tastes are eclectic. Reading the work of poets came to me later in life when poetry began oozing out my pores. I’ve maintained an art & writing blog since 2014. I self-published an illustrated collection of poetry in 2016. My work has been published in a variety of journals. Do check out the books on my list, they are unique, just like you.
Four-legged girlbegins 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.
"Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer." ―Laura Kasischke
For, having imagined your body one way I found it to be another way, it was yielding, but only as the Destroying Angel mushroom yields, its softness allied with its poison, and your legs were not petals or tendrils as I'd believed, but brazen, the deviant tentacles beneath the underskirt of a secret queen ―from "Oh four-legged girl, it's either you or the ossuary"
In Diane Seuss's Four-Legged Girl, her audacious, hothouse language swerves into pain and rapture, as she recounts a…
Ever since my childhood on a farm poetry has helped me pay attention to the world around me. Like a naturalist’s field guide, nature poems name, depict, and explore what might otherwise pass unnoticed. Now in the midst of environmental crisis I believe poets have a role alongside ecologists, farmers, and foresters to protect and restore our threatened habitats and species. Writing nature poetry helps me face and express loss while celebrating what still survives. I value poetry that connects us to what we love and gives us courage to imagine different ways of living.
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.
This new anthology is as entrancing as the lost gardens of Heligan - I cannot imagine an anthology anyone would enjoy more.' Ruth Padel, The IndependentThis beautifully compiled and designed anthology brings together over 250 poems about flowers, plants and trees from eight centuries of writing in English. Fourteenth-century lyrics sit next to poems of the twenty-first century; celebrations of plants native to the English soil share the volume with more exotic plant poetry from further afield, creating a cornucopia of intriguing juxtapositions. There are thirty poems about roses, by poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker and the South…
I’m an American writer, Army wife, and occasional expat who has spent nearly a decade of my life living abroad (including Japan, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates), not to mention seven Army moves stateside. I love to read (and write!) books that explore discordance and dislocation, what it is like to be an American living overseas in a time of war, and how these things impact relationships with friends, families, and strangers, and our concept of “home.” My writing is often an exploration of the mundane mixed with the catastrophic. Oh, and I have a weakness for stray cats. Lots of stray cats.
Shara Lessley and I met in Amman, Jordan, during the Arab Spring—both of us American writers whose husbands worked at the embassy. Poetry is not a staple of my reading diet, but Lessley’s poems are small, crystalline stories that perfectly encapsulate what it is like to be an American woman living in the Middle East during a time of potential instability. This volume is slim, but the Jordan that emerges is vast and unforgettable.
In sparse, powerful lines, Shara Lessley recalls an expat's displacement, examines her experience as a mother, and offers intimate witness to the unfolding of the Arab Spring. Veering from the strip malls and situation rooms of Washington to the markets and mines of Amman, Lessley confronts the pressures and pleasures of other cultures, exploring our common humanity with all its aggressions, loves, biases, and contradictions.
I'm a contemporary African American writer born and raised in the South. It was this sense of place that has shaped my artistic sensibilities. I was in my mid-twenties, searching, seeking for answers and direction on my own, when other Black southern writers were instrumental in pointing me in the right direction: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Ernest J Gaines, Alice Walker, Arna Bontemps, Albert Murray, just to name a handful. Their writings were revelatory. The same issues that they were dealing with a generation earlier were the same ones I was struggling with every day. It opened my eyes, mind, heart and creativity to put into perspective what I was feeling.
Kelly Norman Ellis is the Chairperson for the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Literatures at Chicago State University. And like those who have made the “Great Migration” before her, she too has taken the South with her in this wonderful debut collection of poetry. In this book, she deftly taps into the Blues ethos to conjure vivid imagery of a Mississippi unique with its patois, cuisine, and customs that have unmistakably shaped her worldview as an adult. It was the South that would try to degrade and dehumanize Black life. But it was the same South where family and a village would instill pride, confidence, and self-worth. This is a book of a poet coming to terms with where she has come from and celebrating the journey. It reinforces the notion that everywhere you go, home is already there.
This collection of poems explores the author's southern roots through a blues/narrative voice and revisits her Mississippi youth, while revealing the contemporary voice of a Black woman searching for place and community outside of her southern past.
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 everyone,…
As a poet and a dreamer, I believe in a world where we live in harmony with other people, nature, and the Divine. During the completion of my Master of Arts degree, I discovered a love of poetry: the lyrical cadences of the romantic poems reminded me of the sung psalms of my youth. No life is without sorrow, and the gift of poetry — both writing and reading it — has offered me hope through many a dark time, inspiring me to push on towards a new dawn. My wish for you is that, in these poetry collections, you too find a light during these turbulent times that we’re living in.
While this book of poems, first published in 1964, does hark back to a past era, the poems themselves are timeless. There’s an underlying sense of peace, which gives me solace when I feel bleak and filled with a nameless anxiety. Despite the sorrows, there’s grace in these poems, and in the world Berry speaks of — a simpler world than the one we live in today. Yet, each time I read them, I’m enriched with comfort and hope that frees me from the melancholy of living in a modern world that appears to be losing its way.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The poems of Wendell Berry invite us to stop, to think, to see the world around us, and to savour what is good. Here are consoling verses of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging; luminous hymns to the land, the…
I lived most of my life in Hawai‘i’s multiethnic community—an amazing place, where, for the most part, people of diverse ancestries got along. The foundation of tolerance was the culture of Native Hawaiians, who lived isolated from outsiders for centuries before the nineteenth century and thus had few prejudicial ideas about others. The natives generally welcomed them and adopted their beliefs. While confrontations and violence occurred, they were limited, not long-term or widespread. Of course, outsiders brought their racial and cultural prejudices, but, today, with a high rate of intermarriages among all the ethnic groups, Hawai'i is one of the most integrated societies in the world.
Westlake, a poet of Native Hawaiian ancestry, incorporates influences from Chinese Taoist and Japanese haiku poetry, Dada concrete poetry, the writings of Kerouac and Bukowski, as well as local pidgin and Hawaiian literary traditions. Westlake’s editor and friend Richard Hamasaki writes that the early poems are “calm, contemplative, and serene, often playful, celebratory”—humans interacting with nature, from rain, moonlight, and mountains, to bugs, frogs, and dandelions: “Looks of disbelief: / I’m on my knees / Washing a rock.” The later poems are political: “Westlake blasts away at Waikiki’s rampant tourism and American materialism, which replaced the native culture in his native land. He wonders, “how we spose / feel Hawaiian anymoa / barefeet buying smokes / in da seven eleven stoa ...?”
In an all-too-brief life and literary career, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake produced a substantial body of poetry. He broke new ground as a poet, translated Taoist classical literature and Japanese haiku, interwove perspectives from his Hawaiian heritage into his writing and art, and published his work locally, regionally, and internationally. The present volume, long overdue, includes nearly two hundred of Westlake's poems - most unavailable to the public or never before published.
