Anthologies — A Library in One Volume

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  The Norton Anthology of Poetry

  Margaret Ferguson, Tim Kendall & Mary Jo Salter (eds.) · 6th ed., 2018

  The standard one-volume survey of poetry in English from Caedmon to the present, with extensive annotation and a long appendix on versification. The default classroom anthology for a reason.

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  The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

  Rita Dove (ed.) · 2011

  A poet laureate’s personal map of the American twentieth century, 180 poets deep. Useful as a counterweight to the Norton: shorter, more idiosyncratic, more recent at the edges.

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  Poems for the Millennium: Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vols. 1–2

  Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (eds.) · 1995, 1998

  A two-volume set tracing experimental and conceptual poetics from Dickinson and Blake through Dada, Negritude, and the Brazilian Concrete poets. Vol. 2 (ASIN 0520208641) carries the story from postwar to the millennium.

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  A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now

  Aliki Barnstone & Willis Barnstone (eds.) · rev. 1992

  Beginning with the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna — the first poet whose name we know — the Barnstones cover 4,500 years and more than fifty cultures, ending with Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo and Rita Dove.

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  Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry

  Billy Collins (ed.) · 2003

  As U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins assembled 180 contemporary poems — one for each day of the school year — chosen to be read aloud without commentary. The 2005 follow-up 180 More continues the project.

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  The Best American Poetry 2024

  David Lehman (series ed.); Mary Jo Salter (guest ed.) · 2024

  The latest in the long-running annual; seventy-five poems culled from American literary magazines, each followed by a brief note from the poet on how it came to be written.

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Reading and Writing Poetry — Craft and Prosody

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  Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

  Helen Vendler · 2nd ed., 2002

  Half textbook, half anthology. Vendler walks beginning readers through close reading, prosody, and form, then supplies the poems to practise on. A mainstay of college courses for thirty years.

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  A Poetry Handbook

  Mary Oliver · 1994

  A short, plain-spoken guide to how poems are built — sound, line, meter, diction, voice — from a poet who taught the craft for decades. The natural companion to Oliver’s own work.

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  The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms

  Mark Strand & Eavan Boland (eds.) · 2001

  A form-by-form tour — sonnet, villanelle, sestina, ballad, blank verse, ode, elegy, pastoral — with a brief history and a sheaf of examples for each. The most useful single book on form in print.

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  How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry

  Edward Hirsch · 1999

  An advocate’s book by a poet who served as president of the Guggenheim Foundation. Close readings of Whitman, Bishop, Neruda, Stevens, Plath and others, framed as an argument for why poetry still matters.

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  The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

  Stephen Fry · 2005

  A witty, hands-on prosody primer with exercises: iambs and trochees, rhyme schemes, ballad and sonnet and villanelle. Pairs unusually well with the WebExhibits scansion and forms pages.

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  Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words

  Susan G. Wooldridge · 1996

  Half memoir, half writing-workshop notebook. Dozens of short exercises aimed at loosening the grip on what a poem is supposed to be; useful in classrooms and on rainy afternoons.

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Single-Poet Collections Worth Living With

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  Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

  Mary Oliver · 2017

  More than 200 poems chosen by Oliver herself, drawn from every book she published between 1963 and 2015. The single best volume for readers new to her work.

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  Citizen: An American Lyric

  Claudia Rankine · 2014

  A book-length sequence in lyric prose, prose poetry, and image, on the small and large violences of race in everyday American life. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry.

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  Night Sky with Exit Wounds

  Ocean Vuong · 2016

  A debut collection on family, war, and the Vietnamese diaspora; winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Formally inventive and widely read.

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  The Carrying: Poems

  Ada Limón · 2018

  Limón’s fifth collection — on infertility, illness, the body, and the natural world — won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2022.

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  Life on Mars: Poems

  Tracy K. Smith · 2011

  An elegy for the poet’s father, a Hubble Space Telescope engineer, woven through with David Bowie, science fiction, and cosmology. Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 2012.

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Reference

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  The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

  Roland Greene et al. (eds.) · 4th ed., 2012

  A million-word reference: more than 1,100 entries on forms, terms, national traditions, prosody, and theory, written by 1,100 specialists. The first new edition in twenty years and the field’s standard desk reference.

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