There was this viral post floating around Facebook to name your top 20 poetry books. I tweaked it; 20 felt too limiting, but 25 felt about right. I excluded more recent discoveries/obsessions/influences to sample some of the books that were important to me during my “formative” years (1998-2004). I limited myself to one book per poet, presented here alphabetically:
Garbage – A.R. Ammons
Geography III – Elizabeth Bishop
The Master Letters – Lucie Brock-Broido
Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson
Complete Poems – Hart Crane
Complete Works – John Donne
Trilogy – H.D.
Atlantis – Mark Doty
Gathering the Tribes – Carolyn Forche
Sensual Math – Alice Fulton
The New World – Suzanne Gardinier
The End of Beauty – Jorie Graham
The Simple Truth – Philip Levine
Poet in New York – Federico Garcia Lorca
The Lost Lunar Baedecker – Mina Loy
Changing Light at Sandover – James Merrill
Samson Agonistes – John Milton
Complete Poems – Marianne Moore
Collected Works – Lorine Niedecker
Dream of a Common Language – Adrienne Rich
The Willow Grove – Laurie Sheck
Collected Poetry – Wallace Stevens
Tiepolo’s Hound – Derek Walcott
Boleros – Jay Wright
The Anchorage – Mark Wunderlich