[New-Poetry] Books of Poetry I Love

[David Graham]

Yes, that little exercise has been making the rounds of Facebook &  
the blogs for a while now.

I'll paste in below the one I posted on Facebook last week.  For me  
it was an exercise not in ranking "the best" books of poetry, but in  
thinking about which couple dozen had been most crucial to me in my  
early days as a poet.  With a couple more recent titles I couldn't  
resist.  And mostly omitting my friends' books--for I could easily  
come up with 2 or 3 further lists just of those. . . .

____________________________

I could not resist making up my own little list of Desert Island  
poetry books, once I saw some others' fascinating lists. Hard to know  
where to stop--20, 25, 30? So I just stopped arbitrarily.

This is off the top of my head, and probably omits some of my very  
favorite books, of course. But the books listed are all ones that  
took the top of my head off, often in my starting-out days. Books  
that directly or indirectly put fuel on my fire. Books I tried and  
failed to imitate. Books I carried around in my knapsack for months,  
etc.


1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (especially 1855 edition)
2. Robert Frost, North of Boston
3. Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems
4. William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems (especially the Jarrell  
selection)
5. Charles Simic, Classic Ballroom Dances
6. Theodore Roethke, The Far Field
7. Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
8. Marianne Moore, Selected Poems (1935 especially)
9. Robert Francis, Selected Poems
10. Robert Bly, Sleepers Joining Hands
11. James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break
12. Russell Edson, The Intuitive Journey
13. Laura Jensen, Bad Boats
14. Gerald Stern, Lucky Life
15. Brendan Galvin, Winter Oysters
16. Pattiann Rogers, The Tattooed Lady in the Garden
17. Marianne Boruch, Moss Burning
18. Christopher Gilbert, Across the Mutual Landscape
19. Robert Hayden, American Journal
20. Seamus Heaney, Station Island
21. Derek Walcott, Sea Grapes
22. Charles Wright, Bloodlines
23. Robert Hass, Praise
24. Donald Justice, Selected Poems
25. William Stafford, Stories That Could Be True
26. William Matthews, Rising & Falling
27. Richard Hugo, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir
28. William Trowbridge, O Paradise
29. Tomas Transtromer, Truth Barriers (trans. Bly)
30. Jean Follain, Transparence of the World (trans. Merwin)

Needless to say, some of my most most favorite books are not on this  
list, particularly if they were published recently. And I've mostly  
omitted Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, et al. because they'd  
probably be on everyone's list. . . .



========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz

Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
==========================================




On Mar 1, 2009, at 7:45 PM, jforjames at aol.com wrote:

> That list was from Mary Biddinger's blog....
>
> http://wordcage.blogspot.com/
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>
> Sent: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 7:02 pm
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] 20
>
> Yikes, what is poor Wally doing there!?
>
> Is this list yours or from the blog, James? Sorry, I'm not up to  
> clicking to the blog right now.
>
> --Bob
>
>
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