Cool. I missed that, I see it now.

David R.

17. Making Certain It Goes On by Richard Hugo
 

O.K., I'll cash in my second pick, with the expecation that Hardy and Robinson will be placed by others.

So, yes, this is a collected, but there are very few tracks I'd skip, and there are too many poems I love in different seperate volumes. So this is the right pick. And it actually reads well as a book -- almost like a sort of autobiography.

Hugo's metrically-informed free verse is rhythmic, musical, and well-wrought. His poems are thick with meaning, yet well aerated, and the have a durable quality I admire. And Hugo so often achieves a frank, matter-of-fact voice that never talks down to a reader, and always feels approachable and relatable.

His book The Triggering Town would make my top hundre non-poetry collection, and probably my top five books about poetry. The unassailably humane teaching stance he maintains in that book is matched perfectly in his poetry.

David R.

Editing in to match suit with other posters by posting:

(1) a link to the book at Amazon

(2) a couple links to sample poems:

"Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg"
"Death of the Kapowsin Tavern"
"Wheel of Fortune"

18. Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis: Wendy Cope
 

So we get two, do we? This book changed poetry in a small way. It was OK to be funny. Actually I think her second book is better.

Barbara, thanks for nominating the Hardy. Actually, I had proposed Satires of Circumstance, which is the volume immediately after Time's Laughingstocks. They are both great books but it is the Satires volume that contains the great sequence of Poems of 1912-13 on his dead wife. I don't know if you want to change your nomination to the Satires or if you want to stick with the Laughingstocks (worth it for "A Trampwoman's Tragedy" alone); if you decide to keep with the book you chose then I'll nominate the Satires. Hope that's clear...

19. Life Studies by Robert Lowell
 

This one leaps out for me as a book, and as a volume that is central both to Lowell's work and to the whole of 20th century poetry.

For Lowell, it stands at a point of balance between indulgence and discipline. The formal strictures of his earlier work were loosened, but not yet abandoned. The personal material was gushing forth--raw and agonizing and vital--but still being shaped by aesthetic choices, still being focused and crafted and refined (in a way that wasn't always the case later on).

Of course it influenced many who followed (perhaps too much), inaugurating the confessional movement and opening up a new range of possibilities in terms of subject, tone, and style.

But most of all, for me, it just makes for a thrilling read: when I return to it, it excites me and inspires me to try to write again, to dig back into the worst moments of pain and vulnerability, and press down ruthlessly, and listen hard, and watch, and wait, and trust that something fresh will emerge...like a child dabbing her cheeks to start me shaving, or a mother skunk with her column of kittens, who drops her ostrich tail and will not scare.

I'm sure everybody has a copy already, but if not:
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Studies-U.../dp/0374530963

20. Heart's Needle, W.D. Snodgrass
 

Given Lowell's importance, how about a nomination for the book and the poet that are acknowledged as influencing him--that are commonly cited as inaugurating confessional poetry, although Snodgrass himself supposedly disliked the term?

Those are the historically important reasons, but my real reason for naming Heart's Needle is that I love it, matter and form.

I'll second both 19 & 20. I almost posted Lowell's, but you beat me to it David. "Skunk Hour" and "Memories of West Street and Lepke" are among my all-time favorites. For the Union Dead is up there for me too.

I hate the word importance when used about poets. I shall quote an English philosopher, I've forgotten who. 'I don't think importance is all that important. Truth is.' Truth is when a poet speaks to you directly. Stevie Smith does that sometimes. But she is not, thank Heaven, important.

Where is ee cummings?

Oops--sorry, Gregory! That's what I get for posting at the end of the day.

I have edited my previous post to accurately (I hope!) second your suggestion.

Barbara

21. Open House by Theodore Roethke
 

Roethke was called a strong influence by so many poets after him that it'd be crazy for him not to be included. I'm choosing his first book because of the impact it made, and because, like Frost and Stevens, he waited quite a while before making his debut. But more importantly, at least for the Sphere, it contained so much good solid formal work, whereas in his later books he really began to go off into strange territories. I'll admit that I admire Roethke a great deal, but his poems have a certain coldness, or lofty detachment from the general rabble, and I don't warm to them nearly as much as I do to the work of Auden, Spender, or MacNeice. And I'll also admit that some of his more radical poems, of the later period, are completely unintelligble to me.