Poetry for People Who (Think They) Don’t Like Poetry

Shriver can relate to those sentiments: She says she tiptoed into the genre around her 50th birthday, when a friend gave her a framed copy of “Love After Love” by the late Derek Walcott, a Caribbean poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. “I was like, Wow. This is speaking to me.”

In her aptly titled poem “Never Too Late,” Shriver writes, “As a young girl / I thought I’d feel done / How wrong I was.”

There are many other poignant poems about growing older, including Mary Oliver’s “Hallelujah” and Maya Angelou’s “On Aging.” David Lehman, 76, editor of the annual Best American Poetry collections, considers the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) as “no doubt the greatest poet on the subject of aging … who got better and better as he got older and older.” 

For one:

When You Are Old

By W. B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Recommended poetry collections for beginners

Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems (1988–2000) by Lucille Clifton

“Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000” by Lucille Clifton.

Courtesy National Book Foundation

Matejka praises this National Book Award-winning 2000 collection by Clifton, who was discovered by Langston Hughes and passed away in 2010. Known for her eloquent characterizations of the African-American experience, motherhood and more, the poet received multiple Pulitzer Prize nominations, including for her autobiographical 1980 collection, Two-Headed Woman. Blessing the Boats. Its beautiful titular poem leads with optimism: “may the tide / that is entering even now / the lip of our understanding / carry you out / beyond the face of fear.”

Bright Dead Things (2015) by Ada Limón

“Bright Dead Things” by Ada Limon.

Courtesy Milkweed

Matejka suggests that people new to poetry start with outgoing poet laureate Ada Limón, 49, whom he describes as a poet of “quiet moments” whose work is “lovely to read.” Poems in Bright Dead Things, a National Book Award finalist, include the relatable “In a Mexican Restaurant I Recall How Much You Upset Me,” about the poet’s dead stepmother, whom she both loathes and misses, and “Nashville After Hours,” a joyful ode to the restorative powers of a rowdy night at the honky-tonk. If that strikes a chord, check out Limón’s most recent collection, The Hurting Kind (2022), and watch for Startlement: New and Selected Poetry in September. 

The Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) by Ross Gay

“Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by Ross Gay.

Courtesy University of Pittsburgh Press

Gay, 50, is a prize-winning poetry professor who teaches at Indiana and Drew universities, and a farmer whose poems are full of joy. (He’s also the author of the best-selling 2019 essay collection The Book of Delights, which was followed by 2023’s The Book of (More) Delights.) There’s a sense of wonder in Ross’ poem “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” about a group of strangers gleaning fruit from a tree near the sidewalk. “In Philadelphia, a city like most / which has murdered its own / people / this is true / we are feeding each other / from a tree.” And consider his short “ode to the flute,” where a man and a flute become one.

New and Selected Poems, Volume One by Mary Oliver

“New and Selected Poems, Volume One” by Mary Oliver.

Courtesy Penguin Random House

Oliver, who passed away in 2019 at age 83, is one of the most beloved American poets of all time. The Pulitzer Prize winner spent much of her life on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and is known for her meditations on the natural world. Among her most famous works, included in this National Book Award-winning 1992 volume, is her “The Summer Day,” with its pointed final lines: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” A new collection of Oliver’s poetry and essays, Little Alleluias, which includes her seven-part, book-length poem “The Leaf and the Cloud,” will be released in September.

The Best American Poetry 2024, edited by Mary Jo Salter and series editor David Lehman

“The Best American Poetry 2024.“

Courtesy Simon and Schuster

This edition of the annual collection (the 2025 edition is coming in September) is full of gems. Hard-pressed to pick favorites, Lehman nevertheless highlights Jane Shore’s “The Hat,” which heartbreakingly chronicles the descent of a favorite aunt from whimsical bohemia to squalor. In “Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid,” Catherine Barnett describes late-night retail therapy, browsing the aisles until “the handsome new pharmacist ... prescribes the moon, which has often helped before.” An excerpt from Robyn Schiff’s book-length poem, “Information Desk: An Epic,” about working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tells a funny, subversive tale about finding dead cockroaches planted on a Louis XV desk.