Poetry, better than you remember from school

A lot of people run poetry down. It's the ugly stepsister of fiction. Stories told in verse, seem to make some people nervous. This may be because of learning poetry at school, always being made to read aloud, trying to ignore the giggles, and you didn't even write it. I blame English teachers and the National Curriculum!! Stop picking rubbish poems, there are some great, funny for the right reasons, brilliant, beautiful poetry out there.

Our Poet Laureate is a good place to start, Carol Ann Duffy, first woman to hold the post, her collection, The World's Wife, is one of my favourite and as good a place as any to start with her work.
Other great female poets include Wendy Cope (who is hilarious, try Serious Concerns or Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis), Jenny Joseph (most famous for Warning, which starts "When I am an old woman/ I shall wear purple/With a read hat that doesn't go and doesn't suit me"), Fleur Adcock, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (rescue these ladies from being condemned by students everywhere!) and on it goes. A good series of anthologies to start you of are published by Bloodaxe Books, Modern Women Poets (ed. by Deryn Rees-Jones), Eliza's Babes (ed. Roby Bolam) and anything Virago do.

Then there's the gents. Many a student has come across William Wordsworth (not the bloody daffodils again, I hear you cry) and his contemporaries, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron. That's right, the Romantics. I have a soft spot for Coleridge's Kubla Khan, we were told not to write about it for our A Level as it's a complex piece that can't be compared with anything else. It's also incredibly vivid.
Blake's apocalyptic visions (check out the artwork he created to accompany his poems, most good editions should be illustrated), are fascinating, and anyone with a passing interest in surrealism should check them out.
Even Wordsworth isn't beyond redemption. His Lyrical Ballads (written with Coleridge) are interesting too, he was a country lad, and it shows in the Prelude, he's clearly not comfortable with the sprawling city, despite his initial impression (Composed Upon Westminster Bridge).
I like Roald Dahl's funny, slightly bizarre verse, and also the more surreal elements of a good but of nonsense verse (try Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear). I also like Andrew Marvell, Matthew Arnold (the imagery in his Dover Beach is wonderful, and tragic), some of the modern comic poets are good for a giggle (I suggest getting hold of a copy of The Nation's Favourite Comic Poems for a nice selection of funny poets of both genders). I also think Pablo Neruda's Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair is beautiful, moving and tender. I'm also partial to a spot of Rilke, a light dusting of Larkin, and a dash of T.S Eliot with a smidgen of E.E Cummings to go!

There are some fantastic poets out there, and some great poems. So go, explore the oft neglected poetry section of your local bookshop and pick a new favourite or two to roll around in your head and on your tongue (it's meant to be read aloud you know!!)