Top 5 Poetry Books for Graduates

I have a privileged position. I really do. The graduating class at our small high school has only sixteen seniors this year. Most years we have fewer than thirty. Last year, I chose to add to my normal parting gift of a heartfelt note and gave each senior a pocket size poetry book. Typical frugal educator that I am, I used my Barnes and Noble coupons every few weeks and eventually purchased enough of the same five books.

This year I started even earlier in the semester because I really wanted to give a meaningful volume that spoke to each student. And yes, that is quite the endeavor. Who wants to give something that will lay dust-ridden on a shelf or languish in a box of lost toys? Sorry, that’s the Island of Lost Toys.
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I chose these for pure readability and simple pleasure, hoping that the beauty of word choice would shine, even in the event of an obscure line or two. I could share all sixteen book choices, but that might scare you away. Instead here is the array that just might fit as you consider presents for any type of graduate.

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1. The Essential Emily Dickinson is a pleasant and sweet collection collated by Joyce Carol Oates and published by Harper Collins over twenty years ago. From “Success is counted sweetest” to “I taste a liquor never brewed,” there’s a bit of Emily that appeals to all of us, and this entrancing volume is both a pleasure to look at and to read.
2. I have purchased many of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets over the years because their size is so appealing rather than daunting. Because I have several students who are history buffs, I was delighted to find Everyman's War Poems. It is a fascinating volume because it contains such a variety from Milton to Horace to separate war eras like Napoleonic, Civil War, and the World Wars. Courage, nobility, despair, war disgust, reality. It is a tiny but bracing read.
3. Here’s an unexpected one, that is unless you’ve read my blog regularly. Smoke from This Altar is Louis L’Amour’s seminal work published in 1939 before his first novel by a small press in Oklahoma. It’s a gentle read that contains simple melodic lines often in sonnet or quatrain form describing travel and landscape--

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Weary at last with way-worn wandering
I paused to rest in solemn solitude,
Watching the sinking sun, and pondering
Upon the desert’s melancholy mood.

4. No worthy list can ignore nature, and this is a terrible thing because I enjoy so many nature poets. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Willa Cather, Percy Shelley. It is limitless and varied. Maybe I can include two twentieth century ones then? I would choose the newest 2017 Sterling Selected Poems of Robert Frost, illustrated edition for its keepsake quality. Thomas Nason’s woodcut engravings that have accompanied several Frost volumes in decades past are included in glossy full-page contrast. The pages long to be touched. One hundred poems feature Frost and his New England at their best. Secondly I am torn between Richard Wilbur and Wendell Berry, but alas Berry has published several smaller volumes, that is “approachable” volumes, for young readers. I chose A Small Porch, which contains his Sabbath poems from 2014 and 2015 plus an extended essay on nature— 

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The best of human work defers always to the in-forming beauty of Nature’s work . . . It is only the Christ-life, the life undying, given, received, again given, that completes our work.

   5. And now for the Emilys, or is it Emmys? For Gothic verse, for sheer empathic skill in one so young, I enjoy the Everyman edition of Emily Bronte. Once again, it’s bite-sized and not as thick a tome as her complete poems. True, Bronte often deals in death and grief because it was the reality of the day, but that should not dissuade us or obscure her brighter moments.​​ Consider "No Coward Soul Is Mine" and "Love and Friendship."

I trust these are helpful choices, and I especially would love to hear your gift suggestions.
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