Criticism & Features

NBCC Reads

The NBCC’s Good Reads Long List for Poetry

By NBCC


It would be silly to act as if the NBCC’s Good Reads List encapsulated everyone’s taste. To do that we’d need a list nearly a thousand books long. But in the interest of showing the breadth of voting in our winter list, here are are the poetry titles which received multiple votes, from “The Collected Poems” of Philip Whalen (the author pictured left, reading) to Allen Grossman’s Descartes’ Loneliness,” to Matthea Harvey’s “Modern Life,” which was recently also named a finalist for our 2007 book prize for poetry. The titles are shown alphabetically within the order of highest votes received (i.e., the first seven books tied with the same vote totals).

Simon Armitage, “Sir Gawain and the Green Night: A New Verse Translation,” John Ashbery, “Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems,” Geoffrey Hill, “A Treatise of Civil Power,” Michael O’Brien, “Sleeping and Waking,” Philip Schulz, “Failure,” Charles Simic, “Sixty Poems,” Philip Whalen, “The Collected Poems of Philp Whalen,” Rae Armantrout, “Next Life,” Rick Barot, “Want: Poems,” Marvin Bell, “Mars Being Red,” Eavan Boland, “Domestic Violence: Poems,” Charles Bukowski, “The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1953-1991,” Stuart Dischell, “Backwards Days,” Allen Grossman, “Descartes’ Loneliness,” Matthea Harvey, “Modern Life: Poems,” Julia Hartwig, “In Praise of the Unfinished: Selected Poems,” Ted Kooser, “Valentines,” Kevin Prufer, “National Anthem,” Tadeusz Rozewicz, “New Poems,” David Shapiro, “New and Selected Poems: 1965-2006,” Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Messenger: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2006,” Charles Wright, “Littlefoot: A Poem,” Dean Young, “Embryoyo.”