Award-Winning Poet Marilyn L. Taylor's Book List

Question: "What are 20 poetry books that made you fall in love with poetry, the books that made you think: I want to do this, I need to do this? What are the books that kept you going? Don’t put down the books that you think you’re 'supposed' to like, but list the core ones, the ones that opened all of this up for you."

Here’s Ms. Taylor's list (in no particular order):

Marilyn’s note: Tried desperately to stick to twenty titles; almost made it. Here they are: the books that keep me afloat:

1. Things of This World (Richard Wilbur)
2. North of Boston (Robert Frost)
3. Night Light (Donald Justice)
4. Picnic, Lightning (Billy Collins)
5. View with a Grain of Sand (Wislawa Szymborska)
6. New and Selected Things Taking Place (May Swenson)
7. Heaven and Earth: a Cosmology (Albert Goldbarth)
8. The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
9. One World at a Time (Ted Kooser)
10. Otherwise (Jane Kenyon)
11. Relations (Eamon Grennan)
12. Firekeeper (Pattianne Rogers)
13. Ode to the Cold War (Dick Allen)
14. The Private Life (Lisel Mueller)
15. Archaic Smile (A.E. Stallings)
16. All My Pretty Ones (Anne Sexton)
17. In Broken Country (David Wagoner)
18. The Great Fires (Jack Gilbert)
19. Where Horizons Go (Rhina Espaillat)
20. My Alexandria (Mark Doty)
21. The Lost Son (Theodore Roethke)
22. The Sonnets (William Shakespeare)