2015 Best of Poetry Lists

More end-of-year best book lists are being announced. There are the known and "official" best of lists, like the National Book Awards and there are plenty of lesser known ones.

Still time to grab an end-of-year poetry gift for a friend or for yourself.

The GoodReads website has its list of readers' choice book awards, including 20 books of poetry. There are a few titles or poets that I know, but the majority are ones I don't know. There is Felicity by Mary Oliver, but also the winning title, The Dogs I Have Kissed, by Trista Mateer who is "Known for her eponymous blog and her confessional style of writing, this is Trista Mateer's second collection of poetry."



Assuming that the list is simply based on votes by readers of the site, you can either see it as a real list of books readers enjoyed or a chance for lesser-known poets to have their friends vote them up. I'd like to believe it is the former, a kind of crowdsourced what-I-read-and-liked list. Either way, it brought to my attention some books I would not have seen otherwise.

Another list of 8 comes via the Flavorwire website.  

I occasionally look at Amazon's list of best-selling poetry books because it does mean something to know what people are buying. That list always has titles that seem like they were purchased by students for a class (lots of anthologies) and also a bunch of current titles. I'm not a big buyer of anthologies, but I can see someone buying 100 Best-Loved Poems in the way that I once bought the Miles Davis "Greatest Hits" album (knowing he never had any "hits") in the hope of getting the best in one place.

A Poet's Glossary

Looking through A Poet's Glossary, by poet Edward Hirsch, certainly offers many possibilities for writing prompts.

Hirsch has put together a very international collection of terms from A (as in abededarian) to Z (zeugma).

You might try writing a Bedouin women�s ghinnawa (highly stylized verses) or a style of gentle banter that originated as a sung verbal duel in the West Indies called picong.

There are also the more familiar terms that we were introduced to in school.

The book has been called a followup to Edward Hirsch�s best-selling book How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry from 1999 which contained a useful but limited  glossary.

For example, Hirsch defines "couplet" as two successive lines of poetry, usually rhymed (aa), which has been an elemental stanzaic unit�a couple, a pairing�as long as there has been written rhyming poetry in English. 

We call a couplet closed when the sense and syntax come to a conclusion or strong pause at the end of the second line, thus giving a feeling of self-containment and enclosure, as in the first lines of �To His Coy Mistress�:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

We call a couplet open when the sense carries forward past the second line into the next line or lines, as in the beginning of Keats�s Endymion (1818):

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

     Full of sweet dreams . . .

Ben Jonson told William Drummond that he deemed couplets �the brav�est Sort of Verses, especially when they are broken.� All two-line stanzas in English carry the vestigial memory of closed or open couplets.

In an interview, Hirsch explained his intent for the glossary:

I see this as a book for the initiated as well as for the uninitiated reader. People who don�t know much about poetry can find what they need to know about certain basics, like the nature of the line or the stanza, or the characteristics of a form, like the ghazal or the sestina. But there are also a lot of things in this book that even widely read readers of poetry may not know much about because they are outside our tradition. So, for example, you might not know to look up a form of African praise poem called the or�k�. If you care to think about praise poetry�what it is, how it functions�then the or�k� has a lot to tell you. To help the reader along different pathways, I�ve added �See also� at the bottom of every entry.

Curious about the abecedarian and zeugma?