In this installment, Geoffrey Brock shares some of his favorite books from our collection. Listen to the reading he gave following on Voca.
Here’s a note from Geoff about his process of selecting books.
“The task I was given was daunting: to recommend only 20 books of poetry from the Poetry Center's amazing shelves in 20 minutes. To make the task more manageable, I quickly and somewhat arbitrarily decided to limit myself to the last fifty years, to exclude translations and anthologies, and to include no more than one volume per poet. The result is an idiosyncratic (and incomplete!) list of wonderful books that have happened to make particularly deep impressions on me over the course of the last 20 years or so.”
The Dream Songs, John Berryman
Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
The Man with Night Sweats, Thom Gunn
Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom, Geoffrey Hill
Collected Poems, Donald Justice
The One-Strand River, Richard Kenney
Collected Poems: Robert Hayden, ed. Frederick Glayster
Collected Earlier Poems, Anthony Hecht
Collected Poems, Philip Larkin
Potscrubber Lullabies, Eric McHenry
Hinge & Sign, Heather McHugh
Fredy Neptune, Les Murray
The Homeplace, Marilyn Nelson Waniek
Complaint in the Garden, Randall Mann
Ariel, Sylvia Plath
Hapax, A.E. Stallings
Green, Sidney Wade
Sakura Park, Rachel Wetzsteon
Collected Poems, 1943-2004, Richard Wilbur
Every Riven Thing, Christian Wiman
From the Stacks features writers from our Reading & Lecture Series sharing favorite items from our library of contemporary poetry.