Poetry book suggestions for beginners

[HSafirah]

So, I don't really purchase a poetry book. Well, I never done that, to be honest and I would love to try reading poetry books. Do you guys have any good poetry books that you can suggest?

[roguexunited]

You could read The Art of Poetry by Shira Wolosky. It is not a poetry anthology, but it teaches you how to read poetry through examples. It contains poems by: Shakespeare, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Andrew Marvell and more, plus it is very user friendly when it comes to identifying how each poem works. I think it's a good introduction.

[Fran]

My suggestion is a book called Soundings (Edt by Prof. Augustine Martin) - it was first published in 1969 & was the standard poetry book in Irish schools for many years. It got a second lease of life in 2010 when it was reissued due to popular demand (nostalgia!). I have on my shelf my original school copy (much underlined & highlighted & somewhat dogeared) & while I have added many poetry books to my shelfs over the years Soundings is still my first choice when I feel the need of a poetry uplift - in a way it's my "security blanket".
It will give you a smattering of a wide cross section of poems and poets & enable you to identify what poetry or poets appeals to you.
Not sure where you are situated but it's certainly available from Amazon

[Platonov]

"Selected Early Poems" Charles Simic.

[Williamz]

I recommend Emily Dickinson. Her poems are short in length, shouldn't require a dictionary to read, and are about her observations on life.

[kdtaylor27]

To start getting into poetry, I would recommend one of the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, just to name a few). The cool thing about their work is that it is very accessible and they name drop a ton. So if you start reading Corso and find you like him, you can next read one of the other poets he mentions in his work. Some of the names are other Beats, but a great deal of them are great classic poets that you probably haven't heard of before. I have never spoken to someone who learned anything about PB Shelley or Paul Verlaine in highschool english class. And from there you can branch out more- from Verlaine to Rimbaud to Shakespeare to Marlowe to Blake and so on. There are so many different alleys to choose from. In my opinion, this is how poetry should be taught. Have fun reading!

-- 06 Jul 2014, 09:38 --

To start getting into poetry, I would recommend one of the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, just to name a few). The cool thing about their work is that it is very accessible and they name drop a ton. So if you start reading Corso and find you like him, you can next read one of the other poets he mentions in his work. Some of the names are other Beats, but a great deal of them are great classic poets that you probably haven't heard of before. I have never spoken to someone who learned anything about PB Shelley or Paul Verlaine in highschool english class. And from there you can branch out more- from Verlaine to Rimbaud to Shakespeare to Marlowe to Blake and so on. There are so many different alleys to choose from. In my opinion, this is how poetry should be taught. Have fun reading!

[thsavage2]

I'd like to add William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. They seem simple, most of them are quite short, and they usually rhyme. However, there are many layers to Blake's poems, especially this collection. I recommend them because even if you don't grasp everything (and I doubt anyone does, Blake is a genius), you will get something out of reading his poems. Another strength of this collection of poems is that a lot of them are written to have a corresponding pair, where a poem in Innocence and a poem in Experience will deal with the same topic but from the two different points of view, and this can help when you're trying to get at his meaning. And it is one of the things that makes Blake's poems so fascinatingly multi-layered.

[Nathrad Sheare]

There's a book called "101 Famous Poems." Most of the poems tell stories, and the length of each poem is unintimidating. They're all classic poems, dating from the late 1700's to the very early 1900's. I heartily recommend the compilation!

[FNAWrite]

"Six Centuries of Great Poetry" is a wonderful collection of many works and poets which is still available.