Poetry has a way of meeting us exactly where we are. A few lines can hold grief, desire, memory, anger, wonder or consolation with a precision that prose sometimes has to circle for pages. It is also one of the most rewarding genres to begin exploring: you can read a single poem on a train, linger over a collection for weeks, or return to the same page at different moments in your life and find that it has changed with you.
For National Poetry Day, and for any reader looking for a way into contemporary poetry, classic love poems, queer poetry, diaspora writing or nature poetry, these collections offer many possible starting points. Some are intimate and elegiac; others are formally adventurous, politically charged, playful, devotional or strange. All remind us that poetry is not a remote or difficult art, but one of the sharpest forms we have for paying attention.
Contemporary poetry collections to start with
Alex Dimitrov’s Ecstasy is poetry of appetite, night life and self-scrutiny: a book alive to sex, parties, pleasure, faith, shame and the electricity of contemporary city life. Set against New York and a remembered 1990s coming-of-age, these poems consider what it means to live honestly in a culture that often prefers repression. Dimitrov’s work is musical, direct and alert to fleeting encounters, but the collection also reaches back into Christian upbringing and the complicated emotional charge of belief. Choose this if you want contemporary queer poetry that feels immediate, glamorous, vulnerable and unafraid of excess.
In Time is a Mother , Ocean Vuong writes in the aftermath of his mother’s death, asking how a person continues to live with grief without surrendering joy. It is a deeply intimate second collection, but its emotional field is wider than bereavement alone: family, survival, violence, tenderness and the fractured American present all move through the poems. Readers who know Vuong through On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Warsan Shire’s first full-length poetry collection gathers poems of migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience. The book follows a girl making her way toward womanhood without a secure guide, while drawing on Shire’s own life, the lives of loved ones, pop culture and news headlines. Refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls are brought into focus through vivid sensory detail: music, weeping, surahs, perfume, jasmine, moonlight, turmeric and kohl all belong to the collection’s world. Read this for poetry that feels incantatory, intimate and socially alert, with survival at its centre.
Poetry about place, nature and the more-than-human world
Winner of the 2026 Laurel Prize, Fiona Benson’s Midden Witch enters the world of familiars, fables, hedge-magic and witchcraft. The collection turns toward healers, artists, prodigies and outcasts — often women — who were made scapegoats by superstition, fear and social paranoia. These poems are interested not only in persecution, but in the voices that might speak back: with dark humour, insight, herbal knowledge and a fierce awareness of marginalisation. Reckoning with middle age, perimenopause, vanishing and care, Midden Witch is a spell-book of fear, protection and historical memory.
Seán Hewitt’s second collection, Rapture’s Road , moves through love, loss, estrangement and the natural world with a dreamlike intensity. The poems take the reader into nightwoods and trance states, where ghosts, memories and encounters interrupt the self. Hewitt continues his exploration of the relationship between queer sexuality and nature, following a path that is at once intimate, ecological and mystical. The result is a collection of grief and reawakening, drawn toward tenderness even as it travels through what is hidden, forbidden or broken. Choose it for lyric nature poetry with emotional and spiritual depth.
Driftwork is a substantial selected poems volume, bringing together work from across John Burnside’s decades-long career. Penguin describes the collection as drawn from more than thirty-five years and seventeen collections, attentive to the natural world, myth, magic and the people who inhabit it. Burnside’s poetry often moves through vulnerability, turbulence, terror and desire toward a searching idea of beauty, truth and transformation. For readers who want to spend time with one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation, this selection offers both breadth and depth: a way into a body of work shaped by nature, enchantment and moral seriousness.
Poetry anthologies and classics
Edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, 100 Queer Poems is a wide-ranging anthology that places contemporary voices in conversation with poets from the twentieth century and before. The collection includes poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Ocean Vuong, Carol Ann Duffy, Kae Tempest, Wilfred Owen, June Jordan, Jericho Brown and Natalie Diaz. Rather than offering a narrow definition of queer poetry, the anthology moves through childhood, adolescence, chosen families, urban life, the natural world, queer histories and future selves. It is an excellent starting point for readers who want range, discovery and many voices in one volume.
This Vintage Collector’s Classics edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets offers a beautifully produced hardback of some of the most enduring love poems in English. Penguin positions the sonnets not only for romantics, but for cynics, star-crossed lovers and anyone who knows the ache of unrequited love. Their mysteries remain part of their fascination: some appear to be addressed to a young man, others to a woman, and the poems continue to speak across centuries about love, hate and the intensity of being alive. This is the classic choice for readers who want poetry as gift, keepsake or lifelong companion.
Poetry of diaspora, memory and identity
Momtaza Mehri’s debut collection asks what it means to write diaspora poetry, moving from Mogadishu to Naples, Lampedusa to London. Mixing family experience with wider histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Somalia, Bad Diaspora Poems explores the difficulty of speaking for those who have been left behind. Its forms include lyric, prose and text messages, and its settings range from living rooms and marketplaces to buses, balconies, transatlantic journeys and online spaces. The result is a restless, formally varied book about migration, exile, translation, inherited history and the ambivalence of belonging.
Poetry by celebrated literary voices
Margaret Atwood’s Dearly gathers poems about absences, endings, ageing and retrospection, but also gifts, renewals and the rituals of daily life. Bodies and minds in flux appear beside everyday objects, dreams, animal life and fragments of a damaged environment. Readers who know Atwood primarily through her fiction will find here the wit, acuity and speculative imagination that run through her novels, compressed into a different form. The collection is particularly rewarding for those interested in poems about later life, ecological unease, memory and the strangeness of the ordinary.
