This Quarter Century of Poetry

It is quite a show of confidence to make a list and title it "The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far)"  The "so far" is more of a nod to so much century yet to come, rather than an acknowledgement of the tricky task of saying what are "the 25 most consequential collections from the past 25 years." 

I'm not a fan of "best" lists, but they can be a good starting place for arguments and also as a guide to poets to sample. I have read nine of these collections, but I only own one. Poets are supposed to buy other poets' books, but I just don't want more books in the house. I love books, and it pains me to give away ones I have, but the reality is that I'm never going to read 90% of them again. There are ones I bought and never finished or even started reading! I'm in that phase of life when you are getting rid of things.

The one book from the list I own is The Shadow of Sirius by W. S. Merwin. I don't know that it is the best of the best on this list (which puts it down at #23), but it was one I read parts of in a bookstore and wanted to take home.

The article describes it like this:

"Merwin implores us to see that “the past is not finished / here in the present / it is awake the whole time.” The poet’s recollections include the texture of his mother’s hand at the piano, the image of an old dog running in the hills “like an unmoored flame,” the graciousness of a roofer named Duporte, now long dead. But the act of remembering always takes place amid natural as well as personal history: Merwin’s poetry has an ecological awareness that he sharpened through decades of work restoring and conserving palm trees in Hawaii. His careful stewardship of local flora helps make these poems’ descriptions—of the passing days and returning seasons; of birds and trees; of his wife, Paula, and the life they made together—tangible. That same tactile quality is what makes these verses’ sadness at the finality of loss so pointed."

Still, such a list, carefully made and annotated, is an invitation to read a poet that you have never read before, or a collection by a favorite that you missed. 

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The Poems of Seamus Heaney

This month, The Poems of Seamus Heaney, was published (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and it is a heavy volume of 1296 pages. Published in a single volume for the first time, the collected poems of the Nobel laureate's long career run from his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), to poems written for Human Chain (2010), his twelfth and final book.

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) was born in rural County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, the eldest of nine children in a farming family. His upbringing in Mossbawn deeply influenced his poetry, grounding it in the rhythms of rural life. 

After studying English at Queen’s University Belfast, he became a teacher and lecturer, publishing his first major collection in 1966. Heaney went on to teach at Harvard and Oxford, gaining international recognition as one of the greatest poets of his age. 

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he balanced academic life with prolific writing, producing acclaimed collections such as North, Field Work, and Human Chain, as well as translations including Beowulf. He lived in Dublin from the mid-1970s until his death, remembered as a poet who bridged Ireland’s rural traditions with universal human themes.

Heaney’s poetry is marked by lyrical beauty, ethical depth, and sensory richness. His early work vividly evokes rural labor and natural landscapes, transforming everyday experiences into profound meditations. He combined traditional forms with modern concerns, often weaving Irish myth, history, and the political turmoil of the Troubles into his verse. 

He trusted the local and parochial as sources of universal meaning. His style balanced reverence for the past with openness to classical and global influences, from Anglo-Saxon cadences to Dante and Virgil. While he sometimes resisted being cast as a political spokesman, his work consistently explored the intersections of personal memory, communal identity, and historical struggle.

One of Seamus Heaney’s best-known poems is “Digging”, the opening piece in his debut collection, it is often regarded as his signature work, where he reflects on his family’s farming tradition and contrasts the physical labor of digging with the intellectual labor of writing poetry

DIGGING

Between my finger and my thumb   

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

 

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   

My father, digging. I look down

 

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   

Bends low, comes up twenty years away   

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   

Where he was digging.

 

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

 

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   

Just like his old man.

 

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

 

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

 

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Hear him read the poem

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Happy Fibonacci Day

Happy Fibonacci Day - celebrated every 11/23 because the date itself 1, 1, 2, 3 represents the beginning of the famous Fibonacci sequence. (Okay, technically, it starts with zero.)

One of the most fascinating properties of the Fibonacci sequence is its relationship to the Golden Ratio roughly 1.618). As you go higher up the sequence, if you divide a Fibonacci number by the one immediately before it, the result gets closer and closer to the Golden Ratio.

Lilies often have 3 petals, buttercups 5, chicory 21, and daisies can have 34, 55, or 89. The spirals on a sunflower or a pinecone and inside a Nautilus shell typically follow Fibonacci numbers.

A Fibonacci poem (often called a Fib) is a short form of poetry that uses the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of syllables in each line.

Here's a sample by Gregory K. Pincus (no title - that's a zero?)

One
Small,
Precise,
Poetic,
Spiraling mixture:
Math plus poetry yields the Fib.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Writing Prompts

We post a new writing prompt every month for our call for submissions for the next month's issue. 

There are prompts on our main website going back to 1998. If you are looking for inspiration, try one of these writing prompts from our archive. You get a prompt, model poems, and examples of how other poets have responded with their own interpretations. Many of those prompts also appear on this blog.

Prompts aren't magical ways to beat writer's block, and they don't work for everyone, but they can be helpful. Prompts can help you think outside the box and explore different themes and topics. Regularly responding to prompts can improve your writing style, tone, and technique.

I think they might be most useful because they can push you to try new genres, formats, or styles you might not have attempted otherwise.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org