In celebration of National Poetry Day, local poet and Wild Page writer Aruna Stannard shares some of her favourite anthologies.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
Cosy Poems
Gaby Morgan
This collection pulls together classic and brand-new poems about the things that comfort and nurture us – spending time with friends and family, being outdoors and watching the seasons change, settling in for winter, reading a good book and finding moments to celebrate every day.
It includes poems by Brian Bilston, Nicola Davies, Valerie Bloom, Roger McGough, Steven Camden, Kate Wakeling, A.F. Harrold, Brian Patten, Grace Nichols, Rashmi Sirdeshpande, Ian McMillan, Dom Conlon, Nikita Gill, Paul Cookson, and many more.
Aruna’s highlight: Hot Chocolate by Rashmi Sirdeshpande
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Rebecca Solnit
What does it mean to be out walking in the world, whether in a landscape or a metropolis, on a pilgrimage or a protest march? In this first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together numerous stories to create a new way of looking at one of humanity’s most fundamental and expressive acts.
Arguing that walking as history means walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit homes in on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from the philosophers of ancient Greece to the poets of the Romantic Age, from the perambulations of the Surrealists to the ascents of mountaineers.
Wanderlust takes us on an unforgettable journey and shows how walking can affect the body, the imagination, and the world around us.
The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry
If you stop and look around you, you’ll start to see.
Tall marigolds darkening. A spring wind blowing. The woods awake with sound. On the wooden porch, your love smiling. Dew-wet red berries in a cup. On the hills, the beginnings of green, clover and grass to be pasture. The fowls singing and then settling for the night. Bright, silent, thousands of stars. You come into the peace of simple things.
Tender and intimate, these are consoling songs of hope and of healing; short, simple meditations on love, death, friendship, memory and belonging. They celebrate and elevate what is sensuous about life, and invite us to pause and appreciate what is good in life, to stop and savour our fleeting moments of earthly enjoyment. And, when fear for the future keeps us awake at night, to come into the peace of wild things.
Aruna’s highlight: The Plan
Black Country
Liz Berry
Liz Berry takes us home: to Wrens Nest, Gosty Hill, Bilston; to the summer where she first learned to talk; to the woods where the secrets are hidden.
A parade of riotous characters abound: the Bone Orchard Wench, the Lady Rotcatcher, Carmella ‘Ower Lady of the Hairdresser’.
But her poems also transport us into other, different worlds of the poet’s imagination: the memories and magic of childhood to the dawning of adulthood and the dark, sweet mysteries of love and sexuality.
Aruna’s highlight: Stone
Serious Concerns
Wendy Cope
Wendy Cope’s first book of poems and parodies, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, went straight into the bestseller lists.
Its successor, Serious Concerns has proved even more popular, addressing such topics as ‘Bloody Men’, ‘Men and Their Boring Arguments’, ‘Two Cures for Love’, ‘Kindness to Animals’ and ‘Tumps’ (Typically Useless Male Poets).
Aruna’s highlight: The Orange
Bananas In My Ears
Michael Rosen
From the chaos of breakfast and to the calm of bedtime, this quirky collection of nonsense poetry written by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Quentin Blake is full of delightful moments.
Read of the pleasures of messing about and the pains of feeling ill, of animal antics down at the doctor’s and strange goings-on on the beach.
Aruna’s highlight: Over My Toes
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