A picture of some cobwebs spun over long grass. Because a blog post needs a picture but I don’t know what poetry looks like.
Here are some poems I enjoyed this year, in alphabetical order, with links to text where available; and a video or a place you can buy the book where no text was available.
I was going to write detailed paragraphs about why I like each poem, but you probably wouldn’t have wanted to read that, and I have work to be getting on with.
I’ve read more poetry this year than most (if not all) previous years. With a couple of notable exceptions (e.g. Matthew Sweeney, Glyn Maxwell, Craig Raine and Gillian Clarke) the poems I’ve enjoyed have either been by dead people I already knew about, or relatively not-famous people I either don’t know or know only digitally, whose poems I have come across via competitions I’ve entered. Alas, 2014 will go down as yet another year in which I tried and failed to “get” a lot of relatively successful contemporary poetry (both truly contemporary and sufficiently “modern” to have been published within my lifetime).
Nevertheless, that there is good poetry (or rather, poetry I like) being written by people other than myself is in no doubt. And with that in mind, I shall rejoice.
- The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre – Mark Fiddes
- Coffin Routes – Simon Sylvester
- Dad’s Last Dance – Richie Brown
- Domestic – Matthew Sweeney
- Getting Ready – Stephanie Arsoska
- Home Brew – David Underdown
- John’s Curious Machines – Isabel Rogers
- Letter From a Far Country – Gillian Clarke
- The Next War – Wilfred Owen
- Memory – Christina Rossetti
- Morning Song – Sylvia Plath
- The Musician’s Wife – David Phillips
- My Stalwart – Hugh Pawsey
- The Pig Truck – Natalie Pfeffer
- Placebo – Craig Raine
- The Poison Dwarfs – Matthew Sweeney
- Rubik – Stephen Watt
- Someone at the Door – Glyn Maxwell
- Stowaways – Linda Atterton
- Travelling Light – Rosalind Musman Bleach
- Vote Britain – Alan Bissett
- Welcome To the Language, Leo – Oliver Mantell