10 poetry collections to inspire your writing
BY Emily Powter-Robinson
5th Oct 2023
To celebrate National Poetry Day, we've collated 10 inspiring poetry books for budding writers – from anthologies for people interested in getting started with poetry to experimental collections by some of the best contemporary poets.
Heritage Aesthetics by Anthony Anaxagorou
Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His latest poetry collection Heritage Aesthetics won the 2023 RSL Ondaatje Prize. Anthony is also the tutor of our six-week online Writing Poetry course.
In these daring and sonorous poems, Anaxagorou conducts a researched unpacking of two countries whose dividing lines of a colonial past are still visible and felt.
Uniquely engaged with the complexities of Cyprus and the diasporic experience, these poems map both an island's public history alongside a person's private reckoning. They offer a ferocious and uncompromising look towards the damaging historical structures that have led to now.
Read Heritage Aesthetics to be inspired about: writing time and place.
Nox by Anne Carson
Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, written and created by Anna Carson after the death of her brother.
The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.”
Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages. The poems, typed on a computer, were added to this illustrated “book” creating a visual and reading experience so amazing as to open up our concept of poetry.
Read Nox to be inspired about: experimental poetry.
Obit by Victoria Chang
After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world.
These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ('civility,' 'language,' 'the future,' 'Mother's blue dress') and the cultural impact of death on the living. Loss, and the love for the dead, becomes a conduit for self-expression.
Read Obit to be inspired about: using form.
Sky Burial by Peter Gizzi
Gathered from over thirty years of work, the poems in this generous selection strike a dynamic balance of honesty, emotion, intellectual depth and otherworldly resonance - in Gizzi's work, poetry itself becomes a primary ground of human experience. Haunted, vibrant and saturated with luminous detail, Gizzi enlists the American vernacular in a magical and complex music.
Read Sky Burial to be inspired about: personification.
Rendang by Will Harris
Using long poems, ekphrasis, and ruptured forms, Rendang is a startling new take on the self, and how an identity is constructed. Drawing on his Anglo-Indonesian heritage, Will Harris shows us new ways to think about the contradictions of identity and cultural memory. He creates companions that speak to us in multiple languages. They deftly ask us to consider how and what we look at, as well as what we don't look at and why. It is intellectual and accessible, moving and experimental, and combines a linguistic innovation with a deep emotional rooting.
Read Rendang to be inspired about: identity and linguistic innovations.
American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
Over 70 poems, each titled 'American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin' and shot through with the vernacular energy of popular culture, Terrance Hayes manoeuvres his way between touching domestic visions, stories of love, loss and creation, tributes to the fallen and blistering denunciations of the enemies of the good.
American Sonnets builds a living picture of the whole self, and the whole human, even as it opens to the view the dividing lines of race, gender and political oppression which define the early 21st Century.
Read American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin to be inspired about: modern day sonnets.
Quiver of Arrows by Carl Phillips
Quiver of Arrows is a generous gathering from Carl Phillips's work that showcases the twenty-year evolution of one of America's most distinctive contemporary voices.
Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world.
Read Quiver of Arrows to be inspired about: abstract ideas.
Dunce by Mary Ruefle
With Dunce, Mary Ruefle returns to the practice that has always been at her core: the making of poems. With her startlingly fresh sensibility, she enraptures us in poem after poem by the intensity of her attention, with the imaginative flourishes of her being-in-the-world, which is always deep with mysteries, unexpected appearances, and abiding yearning.
Read Dunce to be inspired about: underwriting and deadpan comedy.
Whereas by Layli Long-Soldier
Whereas confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations.
Read Whereas to be inspired about: identity and place.
A Year In The New Life by Jack Underwood
A Year In The New Life focuses on themes including imminent societal collapse and public unrest; the limits, myths and complexities of masculinity and fatherhood; and uncanny, often amusing scenarios, such as serving drinks to a gathering of fifteen babies or group kissing in Empathy Class.
Read A Year In The New Life to be inspired about: imagery.
Part of this reading list is taken from our six-week online Writing Poetry course with teaching videos, notes and writing tasks presented by Anthony Anaxagorou.
If you want to discover your own unique voice and start writing poetry yourself, join our six-week online Writing Poetry course with Ondaatje-prize-winning poet Anthony Anaxagorou. Next course begins Thurs 12 Oct.
The books linked in this blog can be found on our Bookshop.org shop front. Curtis Brown Creative receive 10% whenever someone buys from our bookshop.org page.