Three Poetry Collections You Should Read
Happy World Poetry Day! Here are three slim collections of exciting, beautiful poetry we highly recommend you read.
Lunch Poems — Frank O’Hara
Often known for his beautiful love poem “Having a Coke With You”, O’Hara wrote many incredible poems throughout the ’50s and early ’60s before his tragic death in an accident in 1966. Lunch Poems is the perfect place to start reading his work — not a collection of poems about lunch, but rather a collection of poems written in O’Hara’s lunch hour, while he worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His playful, breezy tone make these a particular joy to dip in and out of during your own lunch hour. Yet despite how approachable and generous Lunch Poems is, the poems are rich, intelligent and moving, filled with references to everything from ‘50s pop culture, art, politics, and O’Hara’s close personal friends.
For a taste: read Steps or The Day Lady Died
Crush — Richard Siken
Siken’s debut collection won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by literary legend Louise Glϋck. As Glϋck writes in her Foreword, “This is a book about panic. The word is never mentioned” — Siken is far too good a poet to need to be so explicit. There is something obsessive about the poems in Crush — they are sometimes about desire but also violence, desperation, terror. They are often both brutal and gentle, a reading experience that is as jarring as it is touching and intimate. Siken’s poems often dance across the page in strange, unpredictable way — far from the rigid, even lined poems of traditional poetry — but is this that makes his work so thrilling to read, never sure as a reader where he might take you next.
For a taste: read Scheherazade or Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out
Teaching My Mother to Give Birth — Warsan Shire
Warsan Shire may have shot to fame in 2016 when Beyoncé featured her poems in Lemonade but she was already well established in the British poetry scene — Shire was Young Poet Laureate for London in 2013/14 — and a favourite of many poetry fans online. This, her debut collection, was published in 2011, and is as powerful and evocative as it is concise (the book itself is barely more than 30 pages). Shire centres on themes of family, violence, and immigration — she is a Kenyan-born Somali poet who, as her bio states, “uses her work to document narratives of journey and trauma”. It is women who dominate this collection — mothers, sisters, daughters — often fleeing war, abandoned and mistreated by men. Appropriate then that the collection ends with “In Love and War”, a short yet incredibly striking poem: “To my daughter I will say, / ’when the men come, set yourself on fire.’”
For a taste: read Ugly or Conversations about Home (at the deportation centre)
