For
the past several years, I’ve listed the books I’m not recommending for Christmas
gifts. If you’re familiar with this, you know my reason: I believe individual
people are ultimately the best judges of what books they want to read.
This
year, I’m adding a corollary – occasionally, someone who knows you well will
find a book you were both unaware of and that will smack you right between the
eyes. As a retirement present, a colleague at work gave me Anthony Doerr’s novel
All the Light We Cannot See, and it
deserved the Pulitzer Prize it received, its runaway bestseller status, and
every other accolade out there.
The
books I include on this list weren’t all published in 2015, although most of
them were. This is more of a list of the best books I read in 2015, and some
were published a few years, and even several decades, earlier.
I’ve
broken this list into three posts (I read a lot of good stuff this year). This
first list includes poetry and books about poets and poetry.
Poetry
Once in the West by Christian Wiman.
Abide by Jake Adam
York.
O: Love Poems from the Ozarks by Dave Malone.
Faithful and
Virtuous Night
by Louise Gluck.
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudine Rankine.
The Tempers by William Carlos Williams.
River: A Poem by Fred
Chappell.
Birthing Inadequacy: Poems by Natasha Head.
A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking
Country
by Daniel Bowman Jr.
Terrapin and Other
Poems by Wendell Berry.
The Drowned Book by Sean O’Brien.
Ode to London: Poems
to Celebrate the City by Jane McMorland Hunter.
The Poems of T.S. Eliot Volume 1 and Volume Two, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
These Intricacies by Dave Harrity.
These Intricacies by Dave Harrity.
Books About Poets and
Poetry
The Road Not Taken: Finding America
in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong by David Orr.
Photograph by George Hodan via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
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