Six Poetry Collections You Have To Read

We don’t just sell books at P&P. We read them. Voraciously. Here are six poetry collections our booksellers can recommend, from the first stanza to the last.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong
Born in 1988, Vuong can’t remember the 1972 fall of Saigon, but he writes of it as if the experience were still raw. His poems are stunning in their fusion of pain and beauty, often in one image. Both the story of a gay man’s search for love and a son’s account of PTSD passed from one generation to the next, the book is haunted by victims of war, drugs, and hate crimes; Vuong’s depiction of Jackie Kennedy’s experience at the moment of the assassination is a tour de force, as is his recreation of his parents as young lovers seen by “a single candle./Their shadows two wicks.”

The Butterfly’s Burden by Mahmoud Darwish
In this selection of poetry, Mahmoud Darwish explores the relationships between men and women, people and their homelands, and the individual’s relationship to time and memory. It is a beautiful series of free verse reflections which cause the reader to reflect on their own life and relationship to the above. The original Arabic text is also printed alongside the English translation, making this book essential for any Arabic speaker or student.

All the Poems by Stevie Smith
This is, as the title indicates, a lot of poetry. But flip through it. Read a couple. Look at those messy lines that make up her quirky little sketches. Some still debate the literary merit of her work, but though she may couch her revelatory insights in what reads like plebeian’s prose, Smith is indeed a master of the form. Whether she is playing with your expectations of meter and rhyme by doing the exact opposite of what’s considered flowing and lovely (sometimes creating an awkward cacophony that is hard to say at all, let alone without laughing), or bluntly making fun of her English brethren, she is unabashedly and wholeheartedly her own category of poet. One worth unabashedly and wholeheartedly exploring.

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red — a hybrid work of poetry and prose — is a contemporary queer reinterpretation of an ancient Greek myth, in which Geryon, a little winged monster, is slain by Hercules. In Carson’s version, Geryon is a little red boy, a photographer, who falls in love with Hercules. Carson imagines, in cinematic detail, the relationship between the boys. The book is a testament to both young love and queer lives.

Bright Scythe by Tomas Tranströmer
Nobel Prize winner, Tomas Tranströmer, isn’t like some other Nobel Prize winning poets. If you’re looking for the unambiguous revelations of Seamus Heaney, for instance, you’re going to have to dig deep in Tranströmer’s work — which, of course, is the pleasure of it. Subtle and brutally precise are the descriptors that come to mind while reading Bright Scythe. There’s work involved. Nothing is handed to the reader on a silver platter, but that’s the point…and the fun.

Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield
Come, Thief is about those events in life that come along and steal away our sense of ourselves, that cause us to reexamine our lives, our joys, our griefs, our goals, our priorities. The “thief” in Jane Hirshfield’s poems can be something as momentous as sickness and death or it could be something as mundane as falling hopelessly in love or a long trip to a foreign city. But even though there’s always a “thief” in Hirshfield’s poems — an event stealing our identities — there’s also an openness to that “theft,” a willingness to reevaluate and change.