100 Greatest Poems by Living Poets to Read Before You Die

 

Please nominate the poem that you think everyone should read before they die and give us a few words about why you chose it. Read and enjoy the varied selection of poems nominated so far and have fun searching out the poems.

Penny Rimbaud writes, " To talk of ‘living poets’ is to imply that some are dead. Is that not to deny the nature of poetic immortality? The muse knows no gasp. The poet exists beyond time." Good point and well made. We are happy to accept all your nominations, but we are keen to keep our focus on living poets.
  

Nominated by Philip Wells

My favourite poem by a living poet is the epic Vale Royale by Aidan Dun because it is deliriously, radiantly prophetic, and lifts Chatterton and Blake's London singing across centuries, tardising into the King's Cross squats of now, where the ancient, the mythical and the utterly modern dance an irrepressible trinity of timeless barefoot inspiration through the turning crystal fountain of a London Eye.  Very close seconds are Jellyfish by Christopher Twigg because it makes me laugh till I cry, and Mind the Gap by Francesca Beard because the universe shifts a little on its axis every time I hear it.

 

Nominated by Joan Bakewell

Adlestrop by Edward Thomas...a poem that is quintessentially English.   It catches the peculiar air of an English summer, blowy with seeds and dust.  I can't stop at an English country station without thinking of it.  It makes me love England the more"

 

Nominated by Ros Barber

Refridgerator, 1957 by Thomas Lux This gloriously celebratory poem wallows in the sensuousness of apparently ordinary, overlooked objects.  It's a reminder that poetry is to be found everywhere, and that we can make a narrative out of almost anything. It's wonderful to read aloud; I saw him deliver it a few years ago with enormous enthusiasm and energy.  There are plenty of dark and melancholy poems in the world; Lux, as his name suggests, is a very welcome injection of light.  And the last two lines? Just perfect.

 

Nominated by Angela France

My favourite poems change daily but currently I am in awe of the skill of Rose Kelleher and her first collection Bundle o Tinder (Anthony Hecht prize, Waywiser Press, 2008). One of my favourites from the collection is Neanderthal Bone Flute for its celebration of imagination and art, and for its craft. She makes the meter and rhyme look effortless and shows the sonnets true roots as a little song

 

Extract from Neanderthal Bone Flute

Let it be a flute. Let some young man,
perhaps red-haired, have carved it just for fun.
Or better yet, to serenade someone:

 

Nominated by Michael Horovitz

For your 100 greatest poems I would like to nominate a remarkably compressed short poem by the Hawaiian performance artist Stacy Makishi called SPAM. I have published about half of this poem on the first page of the Notes to A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillennium (New Departures 27-30), and the whole of it in The POT! (Poetry Olympics Twenty05) Anthology (New Departures 2005).

 It is a text which manages to convey sentiments simultaneously hilarious and devastating in their excoriation of the near-infinitely lethal consequences of the USA’s series of nuclear bomb tests on the Pacific island of Bikini Atoll in 1954. A photograph of one of these tests dis/graces the front cover dust-jacket of A New Waste Land.

 Stacy’s poem brings the kind of heartfelt passions articulated in Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech together with an indomitable light touch, stand-up comic rhythms and understated phrasing reminiscent of the mind-stilling portrayals of wounded personalities smiling through by Giuletta Masina in the Fellini films.

 

Nominated by John Davies (Shedman)

I'm a huge fan of Irish poet Ciaran O'Driscoll, based in Limerick. For me his poems have both a very special music and profound insight and intelligence, although expressed very simply. We both have sons, so I connected very strongly with his poem Life Monitor from his collection Surreal Man (Pighog Press 2006).

 

Extract from Life Monitor

Morning comes tingling through
along the edges of the blind
and down the hazy spines of shadows.

 

Nominated by Fred D’Aguiar

I nominate James Berry's poem, Fantasy of an African Boy for its moral rigour and the beautiful cadence of its appeal. It reminds us of the need to convert the vicious circle of boom and bust global economics that punishes the poorer countries in the world
into more virtuous circles of mutual support and kinship with the planet.

 

Nominated by Geraldine Monk

Ambient Fish by Caroline Bergvall
Before you die find a recording of Caroline Bergvall reading Ambient Fish. It's a dreamy knockout poem from a knockout poet.

 

Nominated by Barry Taylor

The Unspoken by Edwin Morgan
When the troopship was pitching round the Cape
in '41, and there was such a lull in the night uproar of seas and winds,
and a sudden full moon
swung huge out of the darkness like the world it is,
extract from The Unspoken

Three loping Whitmanesque sentences ranging between the Earth and outer space, night and day, the eternal verities and a kiss in a Glasgow bus-shelter - a poem that has the weight and ambition of the ancients, and a stubborn rootedness in the modernity of TV aerials and Sputnik, the everydayness of bus shelters and cafes. It is also a poem that manages to combine a casual colloquial swing with structural gravity and inevitability - see how wonderfully the moon waxes and wanes across the poem's three phases. A great Scottish poet speaking of universal things - it's difficult to imagine how much more eloquent a poem about the unspoken could be.

 

Nominated by Alan Halsey

The Commons by Sean Bonney
anyone who doubts that there is any genuine contemporary political poetry should read The Commons. It's still a work in progress but the first part can be downloaded on http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.com/
a sonnet-cycle spitting with fierce vernacular riddled with anger and anguish at dispossession and the alienations of official culture yet wonderfully and precariously suspended in song.

 

Nominated by Liz Ingram

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
It is beautifully simple - an evocative winter scene - yet it has an intriguing quality. Where is the rider going, still so far from his destination? And what are the promises he has made? A thought-provoking poem.

 

Nominated by Marie Newton

Michael Cullup's Best Left Alone (from his collection Giving Up Fictions, Fen Press, 2003).
It took only minutes for this poem to commit itself to my memory, where it has remained alive and intact ever since.
I'm still fascinated by its restraint, and by the way my mind keeps throwing up possible answers to its concluding question.

Extract from Best Left Alone
The village I spent so long
trying to get out of
can never hurt me more
than it did then.

 

Nominated by Gary Bills-Geddes

Selima Hill's The Fowlers of the Marshes
A most interesting project - if only as a compass bearing to what one really thinks and feels. Poets I thought I'd wish to nominate fell away from my personal list as I pondered. It was a tough scan, all in all. But in the end, I looked for a poem that had the unmistakable note of strangeness - the mark of true originality - combined with real human insight. The poem I ended up choosing also has an element of subtle humour.

I give you Selima Hill's

"The Fowlers of the Marshes."

Three thousand years ago
they were fowling in the marshes
around Thebes - men in knotted skirts
and tiered faience collars,
who avoided the brown crocodile,"
(extract from The Fowlers of the Marshes.")

 

Nominated by Norman Buller

Seamus Heaney's Digging (I have thought well of this poem ever since it appeared in his first collection Death of a Naturalist in 1966.)

I have chosen it because of the effectiveness of its earthy language and concrete imagery and its fidelity to the agrarian experience with which the author grew up; also because it depicts Heaney's early resolve, as he later expressed it, to put poetry at the centre of his life.

In the second line the phrase snug as a gun may seem, especially in a Northern Ireland context, at odds with the placid theme of the poem. It is, of course, an effective image depicting the intimacy between an implement and its user. The poem was written several years before the outbreak of the Troubles and has nothing to do with them.

Nominated by Jehane Markham

On Losing a House by Mary Oliver
Because this poem confronts and allows so much without ever over stating its case. It is immensely subtle and yet absolutely direct.
It doesn't flinch from attempting to grasp what it is to be human, how we live, love and die.

Nominated by Jacqui Rowe

The Mercian Hymns by Geoffrey Hill
I once read the whole of this in one go on a long bus journey and stepped off into an ordinary Birmingham suburb suddenly glowing with language and a sense of the past. With the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard, there's been a revival of interest in the old kingdom of Mercia, with the West Midlands at its heart. Hill has always spoken to me both as a poet and a midlander; here he weaves his own history with the life of Offa, great king of Mercia and an almost tangible description of landscape, wildlife and vegetation.

 

Nominated by Maurice Riordan

The Man with the Hoe by Les Murray from his 1987 collection The Daylight Moon
It amazed me then, and still does, by the way it springs from idea to idea with an effortless exhilarating energy: 'as in the bra ad/ the heart lifts and separates'. What's it about? Well, just about everything: refrigeration, farming, war, love, planet-warming... It is wide-open to the bewildering variousness of our world but is also equal to it: a poem both rooted in the everyday and exalted in its gaze.

 

Nominated by Rosemary Norman

Undark by John Glenday
I'd like to nominate Undark by John Glenday. It is the title poem of a book (Peterloo, 1995) that I meant to buy but never did, perhaps because what I love in the poem is its sense of sufficiency.

 

Nominated by Brenda Read Brown

Bereft by Billy Collins
I've selected this one out of any number of possibilities because it really is a poem to read before you die; to me it's about making the most of everything, little things as well as big ones, while you can. I've looked at this poem with a number of other people, some of whom find it melancholy; I find it a celebration of life, coupled with a chilling warning about relying on the hereafter.