The ten best modern poetry books
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Your support makes all the difference.1 THE WASTE LAND TS Eliot
"The Waste Land" ushered poetry into the 20th century, or rather, the 20th century into poetry. Eliot wrote most of the poem during a nervous breakdown in 1921 as "a personal and wholly insignificant grouse about life". This statement was one of the poet's rare attempts at humour.
2 HOWL Allen Ginsberg
The poem Howl was first published by the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his Pocket Poets Series in the 1950s. It had the same effect on the then contemporary poetry scene as a drunken minotaur in a china shop. It was honest, raw and unembroidered.
3 ARIEL Sylvia Plath
The book burns with hate, love, self-loathing and anger. Plath wandered down among the roots of poetry, illuminating it - and then became her own fuel.
4 POET IN NEW YORK Federico Garcia Lorca, trans Ben Belitt
This book was the first non-English collection of poetry I read. I was 15; I couldn't make head nor tail of it, but it was like a collection of magic spells to me. The poems are surreal and wild and soaked in blood. They were written in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lorca was murdered by the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War.
5 EXTRAVAGARIA Pablo Neruda, trans Alastair Reid
A wonderful translation of one of Neruda's best poetry collections. I remember hearing Neruda read some of the poems from this collection, which makes it special for me.
6 CROW Ted Hughes
This was a leap of imagination, different to anything that had gone before in Hughes's work. I dithered over making this a choice rather than his Season Songs, a collection of his
nature poems, which I like just as well. I don't think the debt Crow owes to the poet Vasko Popa has been recognised by critics or professors of Eng Lit.
7 SELECTED POEMS Harry Fainlight
The one substantial collection, published in an edition of 1,000 sometime after his death, by a forgotten but major lyric poet.
8 FOR BEAUTY Adrian Mitchell
A bumper collection of poems from a master poet. A wonderful performer and inventor, Mitchell's influence on British poetry in the late 20th century has been huge. And he's still at it now, still making beautiful, kind, powerful poems.
9 A VISIT TO WILLIAM BLAKE'S INN Nancy Willard
Winner of the 1982 Newbery Medal. This group of children's poems is based on Blake's famous line, "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright". A tiger, a cat, a rabbit, and a rat go for a walk on the Milky Way.
10 VELOCITY Edited Maja Prausnitz
I began with something published early in the 20th century so I'll end with this anthology, a bang-up- to-date collection just been published by Apples and Snakes, containing work by a huge variety of new and established voices.
Brian Patten's latest book is a collection of world stories, 'The Story Giant' (Collins)
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