What's your favourite poetry collection?

It's occurred to me, after reading Actual Air this week and actually enjoying it, that the reason I don't read as much poetry I'd like to is because I have far too many complete-works-of-x type things and horrendously weighty anthologies and almost no individual publications of individual poets, and so the whole thing seems kind of onerous and weighty. Therefore I am starting this thread to trawl for recommendations: please to tell me a book you hold close or one you've enjoyed recently. For bonus points recommend multiple poet collections as well, but not if they're a mile thick or published by Bloodaxe or both

An "Objectivists" Anthology ftw

I'm a bit in the same boat - lots of collecteds that I can't always be arsed to carry around when I want to read them on eg commute or won't fit in pocket when I have no bag.
There's the 'poets who didn't write much' solution, so, say, Ian Hamilton's Collected Poems is very slim & maybe worth a look.
Do Selecteds offer any solution? Marianne Moore and Geoffrey Hill (the older version for slimness) are brief, but everything in them is worth tangling with. Edwin Muir's another one with a super-brief, good selected. Muldoon too? (Oddly, not a huge fan of Hill or Muldoon, but sometimes I enjoy being frustrated/impressed by them rather than rereading a bit of Bishop or Auden or whoever).
If you're in the UK, then charity/2nd-hand shops usually have those 1960s Penguin Modern Poets books, each of which contains selections from three poets. Ah - thanks wikipedia. They're mostly less than £1 and 2/3 interesting (tho' after too many years browsing there's something disheartening about seeing 'Amis - Moraes - Porter' on a spine over and over and over again).
The Faber Book of Modern Verse is full of good stuff and not too huge.
Robert Lowell's Imitations is an individual collection I come back to a lot. Oh, and Christopher Logue's versions of Homer are great and portable.
Over on What Are You Reading, a couple of us enjoyed (I mostly expressed reservations, but that's just my unhealthy nature) The Broken Word by Adam Foulds.
Shit. Almost everything I've mentioned is either Faber or Penguin. I think I'm a poetry rockist.

My forever favourite is Pound's Cantos - probly not what you're looking for.
Faber Book of Modern Verse seconded, that's a fine book.
I think Tony Harrison's Selected Poems is a fine book too and it's manageably sized. To be honest there are about a gazillion poets this holds true for tho. I love Basil Bunting's Briggflatts but lots of people don't. Also I've just discovered there's a Bloodaxe edition, soz. But with a DVD! I'm buying that shit now.

Geoffrey Hill's New and Collected Poems looks nice.

lol I didn't see that was already mentioned.

some faves

ck williams - selected poems (his first 4-5 books are great, this is a good overview)
ws merwin - the lice (this is available in his collection, the second four books of poems)
ted hughes - crow
john berryman - the dream songs

also a big fan of the penguin anthology, surrealist poetry in english

My well-thumbed copy of Wallace Stevens' The Palm at the End of the Mind.

there's something disheartening about seeing 'Amis - Moraes - Porter' on a spine over and over and over again

He means heartening, I'm sure of it.

Or not.

I'm not sure why that one is ALWAYS the one that is in second-hand bookshops. Could almost do a thread of books that you always see in second-hand bookshops - that being one. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler being another.

With those slim Penguin collections I was fortunate to find a box set of six of them (including A-M-P as it happens, yes).

As for Collections I Like - Sir Walter Ralegh slips into the pocket easily.

If you see the two volume The Poet's Tongue, edited by WH Auden and J Garrett, it can be worth picking up. It's all different poets obviously, but with the little conceit of not including who each poem is by. I quite like this as a bit of fun, guessing who wrote the poems you don't know and can help pass the time on those pesky journeys on public transport. Also, not knowing the poet (presuming you don't know the poem of course) can result in fresh appreciation of poets you had hitherto ignored, I tell you it can - if you are given to prejudice in such matters, as I am.

One volume slides into an inner jacket pocket with only a minimum of stitch rending.

I'm not sure why that one is ALWAYS the one that is in second-hand bookshops. Could almost do a thread of books that you always see in second-hand bookshops - that being one. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler being another.
We have one, actually!
Books you never fail to see in charity shops.

I'm pretty new to reading poetry, but the collection I've spent the most time reading is a small Norwegian volume of Zbigniew Herbert -- "Report on a city under siege"
Geoffrey Hill is a marvel, even though I have trouble understanding him most of the time. I mostly own cheap whole kit'n'poemoodle collections by a few authors (Auden, Stevens, Hauge, Ibsen, Christensen, Øverland, Crane...)

At the moment my favorite book of poems is The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1950, edited by Helen Gardner. It's ridiculously big, which makes it somewhat unwieldy, but it's so much to open at random and read whatever hooks my eye. I've a tendency to go for the old stuff though -- "From the hag and hungry goblin / that into rags would rend ye"... Such a delight!
This reminds me that I've heard the English translations of Olav H Hauge are really good, so I highly recommend looking into him if anyone's curious about Norwegian poetry.

If you see the two volume The Poet's Tongue, edited by WH Auden and J Garrett

Have a signed copy of one of the volumes of this. Guess which of the authors it's signed by? (clue: I don't think it's worth much).

Cosign on the CK Williams. I pick that up more than the recent collected.

And Crow's a great call for individual volumes. I was struggling to think of ones I like. It is tricky, since most of them I know from the bigger collections and are sensible to read there - so if I say High Windows and The Whitsun Weddings, I feel like I've virtually ended up back at Collected Larkin.

Ashbery can feel a bit more manageable in that sort of dose - Girls on the Run and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror I've enjoyed in single volumes.

James Fenton used to be another small collected man: the old Memory of War/Children of Exile is a nice, brief, concentrated complete poems.

Extremely cool is Hwaet! by Peter Glassgold. It's an anthology of Modernist poetry translated into Anglo-Saxon. I recall Marianne Moore's "To a Steam Roller" turned into "Stemetredere". Also some W. C. Williams.

When I was a boy my mainstay (despite the title) was The Voice That Is Great Within Us, edited by Carruth. Discovered Zukofsky and Kees through that.

I'm awed by Hill but Muldoon leaves me cold.

Frederick Seidel's Collected Poems just came out. It will be mine.

Gosh, this one took off. Thx all. I'll have a look, come the weekend, when I hope to be in some bookstores.

I have 'The Poet's Tongue' - well, one volume of it - the poems are chosen with a particularly morbid bent which has perhaps made it less of a pleasure for me - and so I've hardly read much of it. I might leave it at work. I've read more of the two Donald Allen anthologies in the week of having them on my desk than I have in the three years of owning them previous. Today's favourite: Jackson Mac Low. The volumes have also convinced me I need to further explore Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler. And some others, I made a list in a notebook somewhere. And does anyone actually like Charles Olson?

Also well done to the person who suggested Pound's Cantos, I've been meaning to get around that for ages. I think I decided I want to get there via Kenner's 'The Pound Era', still waiting to see a cheap copy. But I kind of feel I need some of the groundwork.

Re: Tony Harrison: I like that one poem of his - "ai, ai, stutterer Demosthenes" - that's him, right? But I read 'V' a while ago and it killed my interest in British poetry for months, I must say. Is the former of these more typical?

this is my favourite poetry collection (lolz):

A Common Thread/

no, but seriously: it's my baby, but i can honestly say there's some fantastic poetry in there, by people who've never been published and by seasoned small-press writers.

if anyone's interested, email me at chance.press.books (at) gmail (dot) com and i'll email you a few poems as a sample of the anthology.

/end of sales pitch

I've got to throw props to russell edson - the reason why the closet-man is sad. or maybe the tunnel: selected poems.

trying to remember the name of the awesome anthology of south american poets I have, but I'm drawing a blank.... it was curated by strand or justice or somebody like that...

Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology.

collected creely is really good to throw open but I like a lot of what is listed

Also:

- That Emily Dickinson selection Final Harvest (a present from Mom when I was 13).
- the M.L. Rosenthal-edited edition of Yeats' poems and plays.
- Seamus Heaney's first collection

Re: Tony Harrison. I guess he moves between the 2 forms but there are more sonnets, lyrical and shorter poems in the Selected Poems than there are epics. More Greek too.

The first 30 Cantos or so are quite do-able without much exegesis. The later ones get much tougher, but this is a question of how you read a book as much as esoteric knowledge. They can be a jumping off point for exploration, but you can still quite easily groove on the whole thing's increasingly austere music. Pound is really a reading outdoors poet, for me.

If you liked Actual Air, you might, and I hope you would, like Worshipful Company of Fletchers by James Tate (and more of his books)-- Tate, who I think was an actual inspiration to D. Berman. Also, The Naomi Poems by Bill Knott. Those two are bonifide American surrealist poets of the first order. You might also include Gregory Orr's Burning the Empty Nests. (Of course that's Deep Image, a different beast all together. Then you get into James Wright, and who knows what else... Bly, etc.) What about Tom Lux, Split Horizon? And Craig Raine, The Onion, Memory? And A Coney Island of the Mind? I'd group them all as possible poetic sperm doners to Berman -- who, I don't think even considers himself a poet anymore. More like a rehabbed rock star because of... realizing he's actually Jewish? Anyway. Actual Air, it's great. Pound? Not a good recommendation, esp. not the Cantos. Don't waste your time. Not Ashbery either. Whatever he is, his sense of humor, and of the absurd... is, if you liked Actual Air, not going to fill your... lungs?

funny, I just took a prowl through the bookshelves for some more recommends and came up with james tate's the lost pilot. dude wrote the book in his early 20s, makes you want to snap yr pencils. since I have nothing better to do, here's a sample...

Rescue

For the first time the only
thing you are likely to break

is everything because
it is a dangerous

venture. Danger invites
rescue – I call it loving.

We've got a good thing
going – I call it rescue.

Nicest thing ever to come
between steel cobwebs, we hope

so. A few others should get
around to it, I can't understand

it. There is plenty of room,
clean windows, we start our best

engines, a-rumm... everything is
relevant. I call it loving.

donald nitchie i would like to point out the thread title question was in fact not 'i like the poetry of david berman: what should i read next' but 'what is your favorite poetry collection'. you have not answered this question.

that said, thank you for your recommendations: i will hopefully get around to them, except the ferlinghetti.

Right you are, sorry. My favorites (ones I actually re-read) are: Horace's Odes, tran. David Ferry (also William Humphries did a good one). Larkin's Collected Poems (2003). Auden's selected. Recently, Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw (21 Gun Salute to Ronald Reagan[!]), Carl Dennis's Ranking the Wishes. What Narcissism Means to Me, Tony Hoagland. Metroplolitan Tang by Linda Bamber. First Course in Turbulence by Dean Young. I like alot of what is listed above

perennial favorites:

bob kaufman - cranial guitar, selected poems
lew welch - ring of bone, collected poems

probably my favorite poet:

philip lamantia - bed of sphinxes. I recommend any and all lamantia tho a lot of it is hard to find. or expensive when you do. sphinxes is still in print i think. the welch probably is too but i'm uncertain about the kaufman.

obvious but hey. it's my favorite/

http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/122946/2094022/2100281/040527_PhilipLarkin.jpg

James Krusoe, Jungle Girl - I wish I had copies to give to all my friends, it's such a delight

These are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. These are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

Basil Bunting, "On a Fly-leaf of Pound's Cantos"

Recent James Tate (the White Donkeys one), Frederick Seidel, Jack Gilbert.

When I was 20 I fell in love with Stephen Dobyns's Cemetery Nights, then lent it to a girlfriend who kept it when she gave me back all the other books she'd had. The book is out of print and commands steep price, but I found a $6 used copy over the weekend and am really glad to have it again. None of his other books quite match up to this one. Posted a poem of his toward the bottom of this thread.

I didn't even have to think about this one. It is easily:

http://a6.vox.com/6a00cd96fb2ae84cd500e398b80d560004-500pi

That's a great Dobyns poem, Eazy. I missed that whole thread.

I love Cemetary Nights. Favorite poems include Tomatoes, How to Like It, Creeping Intelligence, and Pony Express. I remember that Dobyns was very close with Raymond Carver, and I always wondered if those poems were influenced by him: not prose poems, really, but short narratives, minimal in scale, that attempted to get to the heart, or the point, of a short poem story, in a page and half-- and in a lot of them he did. Very entertaining, and occasionally really moving.

(and I love that Ferlinghetti cover...)

Yes, the cover is great.

This is my favorite poem from CIotM:

Not like Dante
Discovering a commedia
Upon the slopes of heaven
I would paint a different kind
of Paradiso
in which the people would be naked
as they always are
in scenes like that
because it is supposed to be
a painting in their souls
but there would be no anxious angels telling them
how heaven is
the perfect picture of
a monarchy
and there would be no fires burning
in the hellish holes below
in which I might have stepped
nor any altars in the sky except
fountains of imagination

Damn, the form didn't come out right. Oh well, it's still excellent.

thanks for reintroducing me to dobyns! I have his velocities, a selected poems collection I bought after picking it off a bookstore shelf and randomly opening it to a poem which was fantastic. once I started reading the book I didn't find anything near the quality of that one poem and never went back to him. but I checked out the cemetery nights poems in it tonight and they are great.

anyway, here's that poem that compelled me to buy the book in the first place...

Letter Beginning with the First Line of Your Letter

Here the weather remains the same. Constant
summer sun. When was the sky anything but blue?
In the harbor park, boys on bikes plague lovers
and the pink-eyed dogs of the elderly.
Across the water, freighters take on cargo.
I stand on the shore, envying each destination.
Because you are not here, I think of you
everywhere; wherever they are going
they must be going to you. We were like
fat people in old cartoons who could
barely kiss for all their mortal baggage;
like holiday travelers who have missed their trains,
are stranded in a European station surrounded by
wicker baskets, belted trunks. We had such baggage.
It increased and became such a mountain that we
lost each other behind it, until our voices
grew distant and we returned to writing letters.
Whose baggage, whose mistakes, who cares now?
Listen, I am thirty-six, I have lived in
many cities and within me it is raining.
The deliberate ocean repeats and repeats.
Empty lifeguard stands, paper cups and
plastic spoons, the folded green cabanas--
all mark the deserted beaches of the heart.
Water drips from colored pennants, glistens
on the black taxis on the esplanade.
In the empty ballroom of a beach hotel, someone
is practicing the piano. In sitting rooms and parlors,
guests turn the pages of their magazines, look at
rain on windowpanes, look at watches, look at
the closed door of a dining room from which they hear
the rattle of dishes and silver, of tables being set.
Listen, from such a place I am writing you a letter.
Again and again, I try to put down a few words.
As day and sky dissolve in sheets of gray,
the sea repeats your name to the desireless sand.

I wonder how much the cemetery nights poems were influenced by russell edson, whose prose poems all start with an absurd scenario that is followed to its logical extreme.

Dobyns also spent time (I think) in Latin America, and wrote some novels with magic-realism premises. What's neat about these poems is how they are completely in that tradition, but completely American at the same time.

My friend Leigh, who is now working at the New Yorker and is also one of the best writers I've personally known, had some good poems published this week.

yeah, I think his wife was brazillian, and he mentions living there in the author's note for velocities. unless I was misreading him, in the same note he implies that the local literature wasn't an influence on him, or maybe he was just being coy.

speaking of south america, another republic is the name of the anthology I was trying to remember upthread, edited by simic and strand

my father introduced me to dobyns. he was a fan of his saratoga murder mystery series and i read all those. then i read his crazy novel the wrestler's cruel study and then i bought his collected poems. my dad stole my copy of the poems and never gave it back. i seem to remember that he was always getting in trouble for doing inappropriate stuff whilst drunk as a professor up there. (upstate new york where my parents live.) but i could be remembering wrong, so don't sue.

I love Saratoga Hexameter, where the sleuth has to infiltrate a writers' colony to catch a murderer, and actually has to write a poem to keep his cover. I won't spoil it by giving details, you all have to read it.

Commotion

Tom asked, Are those sharks? and I looked.
We were teetering warily along a narrow strip
of planks laid in a long arc on top of the water.
With each step the planks sunk a bit beneath
the surface but still seemed firm, vanishing
in front and behind, spanning the bay. It was
almost sunset after a day of unsettled weather.
Ahead through a split in thick clouds the sun
hung a few inches over the water, pouring forth
its red and golden radiance. My feet were wet
but I felt calm as I scanned the horizon for sharks.
Most nights my dreams are all work, a ditch
I keep digging in my sleep, but this one came
as a gift, for far to the south I saw a commotion
in the water—row after row of some creature,
plunging ahead, rising and sinking, like horses,
but not horses, with ears flapping behind them
and their muzzles raised. The dayʼs last light
shone on their wet fur—brindle or tan, black
or spotted with white—hundreds, stretching off
in the distance, a furious energy of forward motion
as their paws broke the surface and they arced
through the white froth. They had nothing to do
with us, but would cross our path a short way
farther on. Tom and I had paused in our careful
progression. No, I said, theyʼre not sharks. They're
Great Danes. Oh, said my friend, I was wondering.

For Thomas Lux

—Stephen Dobyns

I'm fine with all this about Dobyns! My other favorite book of poems of his is Griffin, from 76, where he writes, in one section, simple short poems about the 7 deadly sins, along with ones about Grief, Doubt, Dancing... Here's part of Vanity:

I write this,
you read this.

I also liked his novel A Boat Off the Coast, about a lobsterman smuggling pot; The Two Death's of Senora Puccini (set on the night of the 74 coup in Chili); and Boy in the Water, very creepy. And while his recent poetry haven't held up for me as much as Cemetary Nights, there's always some good poems. The Porcupine's Kisses is really weird, formally, goofy aphorisms with illustrations. It's kind of one of a kind; I was fascinated by it

And oh, yeah, Tom Lux! he's a world unto himself, and well worth checking out as well

I forgot about Eating Naked! His book of short stories. That's great too.

i was disappointed by his suspense novel The Church of Dead Girls. the best thing about it was the title, and it really read like a bid for movie-dom.

yeah, eating naked is essential. and it's great to have his short stuff in one place. some of the stories reminded me of my 80's hero Scott Bradfield. i was actually gonna start a Scott Bradfield thread. but i need to re-read his stuff. it's been so long since i've read some of it.

That one EIII posted is so great. By the time I got to the rattling dishes I was verklempt.

my selected works 1995-2008 should totally be ur fave poetry collection:

http://www.twentythreebooks.com/images/atlpressrelease.pdf

(sorry to spam folks, i do post on ILX for other reasons, though, and i do love to read -'d probably nominate an auden collection i have somewhere in my stacks but can't remember the title now)

Review: Monolithos: Poems
User Review - Stacey Tran - Goodreads
dear alfred knopf, i can only renew the copy they have at the library so many times. please print more of these so i can buy one. love, stacey Read full review

http://www.ucpress.edu/img/covers/110/1485.110.jpg

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266817901m/1497422.jpg

In Sepia

Often you walked at night, house lights made
Nets of their lawns, your shadow
Briefly over them. You had been talking about
Death, over & over. Often
You felt dishonest, though certainly some figure
Moved in the dark yards, a parallel
Circumstance, keeping pace. By Death, you meant
A change of character: He is
A step ahead, interlocutor, by whose whisper
The future parts like water,

Allowing entrance. That was a way of facing it
& circumventing it: Death
Was the person into whom you stepped. Life, then,
Was a series of static events;
As: here the child, in sepia, climbs the front steps
Dressed for winter. Even the snow
Is brown, &, no, he will never enter that house
Because each passage, as into
A new life, requires his forgetfulness. Often you
Would explore these photographs,

These memories, in sepia, of another life.
Their use was tragic,
Evoking a circumstance, the particular fragments
Of an always shattered past.
Death was process then, a release of nostalgia
Leaving you free to change.
Perhaps you were wrong; but walking at night
Each house got personal. Each
Had a father. He was reading a story so hopeless,
So starless, we all belonged.

--Jon Anderson

Lunch Poems
Michael Robartes & the Dancer / The Tower
Station Island
Meeting The British
The Indoor Park