Here You Go ~ My 20 Books of Poetry

20 poetry books that made me fall in love with poetry (or that made me continue loving it).

These are in no particular order.

Rose - Li-Young Lee
She Had Some Horses - Joy Harjo
The Complete Poems - Elizabeth Bishop
The Book of Light - Lucille Clifton
Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon - Pablo Neruda
American Primitive - Mary Oliver
Country Music - Charles Wright
The Master Letters - Lucie Brock-Broido
And Her Soul Out of Nothing - Olena Kalytiak Davis
Elegy - Larry Levis
Asylum - Quan Barry
The Portable Walt Whitman
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Glass, Irony, and God - Anne Carson
Fabulae - Joy Katz
Salvation Blues - Rodney Jones
Ariel - Sylvia Plath
Opened Ground - Seamus Heaney
Grace Notes - Rita Dove
The Complete Poems - Emily Dickinson

There are many more recent books that come to mind, but I want to wait and see what kind of staying power these new collections have for me. Perhaps I'll return to this list in 5 years and see what pops to the surface

In looking at these titles, I see the faces of my past teachers and friends who introduced me to these books, creating the connections that form a web around my bookshelf. I also remember the random discoveries in bookstores in unfamiliar cities.