The 10 Best Poetry Books for Readers Who Don't Usually Read Poetry

Oliver spent her life looking at ponds, geese, grasshoppers, and the hour before dawn with a quality of attention that most people reserve for crises. Her poems are not difficult. They are direct, warm, and earned — the product of decades of genuine looking. Devotions collects the best of fifty years of work. Start anywhere. The poem "Wild Geese" is where most readers begin. It will not disappoint.

Komunyakaa grew up in Bogalusa, Louisiana, served in Vietnam, and came back to write poems that sound like nothing else in American poetry — syncopated, musical, harrowing, funny. The Vietnam poems in Dien Cai Dau, collected here, are among the finest war poems in the language. The jazz poems are celebrations. Together they form a portrait of a life and a country.

Vuong's debut collection reads like nothing so much as a novel compressed to its essential moments — a Vietnamese-American family, war's long aftermath, desire, tenderness, and the body as a site of both violence and love. His prose novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous introduced him to a much wider readership; the poems are where his gifts first appeared and where they remain most concentrated.

Trethewey weaves together the story of the Louisiana Native Guards — Black Union soldiers largely erased from Civil War history — with the story of her own mother's murder. The result is a book about what gets remembered and what gets buried, and how the personal and the historical are never really separate. The sonnets are masterworks. The collection as a whole is one of the great American poetry books of the last thirty years.

Smith uses the vocabulary of science fiction and space exploration to write about her father's death — and in doing so discovers that grief and the cosmos are the same size. The poems move between David Bowie lyrics and the Hubble Space Telescope with complete naturalness. This is a book that shows what poetry can do when it refuses to respect the usual categories.

Citizen does not look like most poetry books. It includes photographs, images, prose passages, and lyrics that resist every category. It is about race in America — specifically, the accumulation of small violences that constitute daily life for Black Americans — and it is one of the most important American books of the twenty-first century. It will make you think differently about what a poem can be.

Heaney is the most beloved poet of the twentieth century's second half for good reason: his poems are physically alive. You can feel the weight of a spade, the cold of a bog, the sound of a particular vowel. He writes about rural Ireland and about violence and about the act of writing itself with equal precision and equal music. The selected poems is the right place to start — wide enough to find what grips you.

Bishop published fewer than one hundred poems in her lifetime and is considered one of the greatest poets in the English language. The reason is simple: every poem is exact. Nothing is vague, nothing is performed. She writes about a fish, a waiting room, a map, a moose — and each poem becomes a way of thinking about what it means to pay attention. Our full introduction to Bishop covers her life and work in detail.

Seuss writes from inside a life most poetry has not wanted to look at — rural Michigan poverty, addiction, grief, desire, survival — with the formal intelligence of a writer who has read everything and forgotten nothing. The sonnets are loose and rangy and sometimes shocking and always exactly right. This is the book that proves poetry can go anywhere. See our essay on Seuss and the confessional tradition for more.

The debut publication of Ink & Ribbon Press, and a book unlike anything else on this list. Lampe moves through a year of Oregon rain with the classical tradition in one hand and domestic life in the other — letters, chants, seasonal markers, and a devotion to the long word that is entirely its own. This is a book for readers who want to be surprised by what poetry can do. Limited edition of 250 copies.