17 Best Poetry Books for Beginners, Including the Indian Ones

Mary Oliver spent decades walking around the woods and ponds of Provincetown and writing short poems about what she saw. Devotions is the selection she made herself, arranged so the late work comes first and the early work last. The poems are short, the sentences are ordinary, and hardly any of them need you to know anything in advance. What they ask is that you slow down for four lines. This is the book I hand to people who tell me they do not get poetry, and so far nobody has handed it back.

Gulzar has been writing film songs since the nineteen sixties, and this book collects a hundred of them with English translations alongside. Reading a lyric you have known since childhood, laid flat on a page with no tune underneath it, is a genuinely strange experience. Lines you sang past for twenty years stand up and turn out to mean something specific, usually about distance or memory or somebody leaving in the rain. It is the least frightening poetry book in India, because you are not starting from zero. You have been carrying half of it around in your head already.

Billy Collins writes poems that begin somewhere completely ordinary, a lanyard from summer camp, a dog, a piano lesson, and then move about two feet sideways until you are standing somewhere else entirely. This book gathers his earlier work together with new poems. He is funny, which is rarer in poetry than it should be, and he is never obscure on purpose. One poem in here describes readers tying a poem to a chair and beating it with a hose to make it confess what it means, which is a fair description of what school did to most of us.

Rumi was a Persian scholar and mystic living in what is now Turkey, and these are Coleman Barks's versions of his poems, built from earlier literal translations rather than from the Persian itself. That distinction matters and I come back to it below. What you get is warm, direct, quotable writing about longing, God, wine, loss and welcome, with the formal architecture of the original mostly dissolved. The Guest House, which treats every arriving emotion as a visitor you are obliged to let in, is the one everybody eventually meets on somebody's wall.

Tagore wrote these as songs in Bengali and then put them into English himself, as prose poems rather than metrical verse, which is why they read so oddly and so well. They are addressed to a god, or a lover, or death, and frequently you cannot tell which, and that uncertainty is most of the pleasure. The famous one, number thirty five, asks for a country where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, and it has been quoted in Indian classrooms and speeches ever since.

Wendy Cope's first collection is one of the few genuinely funny poetry books that is also serious about form. She writes villanelles and sonnets and then fills them with disappointing boyfriends, divorce and parodies of famous male poets, including an invented character named Jason Strugnell who produces dreadful verse from Tulse Hill. The jokes land immediately. A week later you notice the sadness sitting underneath about half of them. Her second collection, Serious Concerns, does the same job if this one is hard to find.

Kabir wove cloth in Benares and made poems while he wove, and the poems go after everybody: Hindu priests, Muslim clerics, ascetics, the vain, the certain. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's translation is why this particular edition is worth owning. He drops the reverent tone usually applied to devotional verse and hands Kabir a sharp street voice, slang included. The result is funny, rude and unexpectedly current, and it kills the idea that old Indian poetry has to be read in a temple whisper.

Vuong's first collection moves between a Vietnamese family history, the war that produced it, an American childhood and a queer coming of age, in language that keeps doing things you did not know were permitted. Some poems break apart across the page. Some run almost like stories. What holds the book together is tenderness aimed at difficult people, particularly a father. It is the newest book on this list and the one most likely to convince a young reader that poetry is a living thing rather than a school subject.

Nissim Ezekiel lived in Bombay, taught, edited, and wrote poems about the city, marriage, belief and the ordinary compromises of a working life. Most Indians first meet Night of the Scorpion in a textbook, a village crowding into a hut around a mother who has been stung, and the poem survives the textbook, which is the highest compliment available. The other side of him is the comic Indian English poems, where he writes the way people around him actually spoke. That was controversial then and simply reads as accurate now.

John is twenty six, successful and miserable, so his former girlfriend places a personal advertisement on his behalf, and from there Vikram Seth runs an entire novel of love affairs, friendships, protests, a cat and a lawsuit. The catch is the form. The whole book is in sonnets, rhymed and metered, several hundred of them. It should be completely unbearable. Instead the rhyme carries you along like a current, and after ten pages you stop noticing it at all, which is the real achievement.

Tishani Doshi lives on a beach in Tamil Nadu, trained and worked as a dancer, and writes poems with a body inside them, which is less common than it sounds. This collection moves between the sea, family, illness, travel and violence against women. The title poem, written in memory of a woman who was murdered, has girls walking out of the trees carrying their wounds, and it is the one most likely to leave you sitting still for a minute afterwards. The rest of the book is quieter and stranger than that opening suggests.

A man travels to Jejuri, a pilgrimage town with a temple to Khandoba, and looks at all of it with no faith whatsoever. What he finds is a priest thinking about his lunch, a caretaker, a broken idol, an old woman after money, dogs, a hen, stone. The poems are short and plain and manage to hold the wonder and the fraud in the same hand without deciding between them. Kolatkar wrote in both Marathi and English and had an unmatched eye for the absurd detail. This is the Indian poetry book I would put in a time capsule.

Faiz wrote in Urdu, spent years in prison for his politics, and produced poems that get sung at protests and at weddings with roughly equal frequency. The central move in his work is a blurring: the beloved and the country become the same person, so a line of longing is also a line about a nation, and a censor cannot easily object. This Penguin selection, translated by Baran Farooqi, is the version you can actually find in an Indian bookshop. Read a few aloud even if your Urdu is thin, because the sound is doing half the work.

Kamala Das wrote in English and in Malayalam and observed the limits of neither. Her poems are about a body, a marriage that disappointed her, love that failed to arrive as advertised, and the particular loneliness of a woman instructed to behave. An Introduction, the poem everyone starts with, is about language and womanhood and refusing to be told which parts of either belong to her. The voice is direct to the point of discomfort, which is exactly why it still reads as current sixty years later.

Milk and Honey runs in four short sections, moving from pain through love and a breakup to recovery, written in lower case with small line drawings and almost no punctuation. The pieces are short, sometimes two lines, and they say what they mean without any detour. That directness is the whole argument about this book: admirers find it honest and immediate, critics find it thin and point out that a line break is not by itself a poem. Both camps are describing the same page accurately.

Plath wrote most of these in a few months at the end of her life, often before dawn, and they bear almost no relation to the polite verse of her earlier work. They are fast and furious, full of bees, horses, hospitals and fathers, and the images arrive with a force that does not check whether you are ready. This restored edition prints her own selection and running order, which her husband had rearranged for the first published version, and reading it in her sequence is a noticeably different book.

Meena Kandasamy takes stories from Tamil and Sanskrit tradition and retells them with the women at the centre and the anger left in. Caste runs through the whole book, and so does the body, and so does a sharp comic instinct that stops the collection from turning into a lecture. The poems are short, loud and built to be spoken out loud. It is a small press book from Navayana and it looks like nothing much on a shelf, which suits it.