The Best 21 Books in 21 Years of the 21st Century

In the Spring we put out a call for people’s choices of favourite books.

‘Poetry is more than ever necessary to us just now.  It would be good to know which books have meant most to you in the first twenty-one years of the 21^st Century, and which you would most recommend to others.  They needn’t be ‘feel good’ (that’s not how it works, is it), but equally we’re not looking to construct a league table. 

Please choose up to half a dozen poetry books (single collections or/and anthologies) published since 2000.  With a short comment if you wish about all or some of them. 

And, while we’re polling, which two or three books still mean most to you from the 20^th Century?

We will publish in the next North a list of the books that our friends and readers recommend – books that everyone should read or re-read, and especially books you love that we might have missed.’

The results so far are given below. We are still compiling – please do add to the survey.

21st Century Titles

Six Nominations	Fiona Benson	Vertigo & Ghost	Cape, 2019
	Sharon Olds	Stag’s Leap	Cape, 2012
	Alice Oswald	Falling Awake	Cape, 2016
	Claudia Rankine	Citizen	Graywolf / Penguin, 2014
Five Nominations	Eavan Boland	The Historians	Carcanet, 2020
	Andrew McMillan	Physical	Cape, 2015
Four Nominations	Liz Berry	Black Country	Chatto & Windus, 2014
	Kei Miller	The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion	Carcanet, 2014
	Helen Mort	Division Street	Chatto & Windus, 2013
	Seamus Heaney	Human Chair	Faber & Faber, 2010
	Alice Oswald	Dart	Faber & Faber, 2002
Three Nominations	Mimi Khalvati	Afterwardness	Carcanet, 2019
	Raymond Antrobus	The Perserverance	Penned in the Margins, 2019
	Rebecca Elson	A Responsibility to Awe	Carcanet, 2018
	Ocean Vuong	Night Sky with Exit Wounds	Cape, 2017
	Sinead Morrissey	On Balance	Carcanet, 2017
	Jacob Polley	Jackself	Picador, 2016
	Mark Doty	Deep Lane	Cape, 2015
	Imtiaz Dharker	Over the Moon	Bloodaxe, 2014
	Louise Glück	Faithful and Virtuous Night	Carcanet, 2014
	Sinead Morrissey	Parallax	Carcanet, 2013
	Esther Morgan	Grace	Bloodaxe, 2011
	Jo Shapcott	Of Mutability	Faber & Faber, 2010
	John Glenday	Grain	Picador, 2009

20th Century Titles

Four Nominations	Elizabeth Bishop	The Complete Poems	Chatto & Windus, 1983
	Seamus Heaney	Opened Ground	Faber & Faber, 1966
	Frank O’Hara	Lunch Poems	City Lights, 1981
	Sylvia Plath	Ariel	Faber & Faber, 1965
Three Nominations	T S Eliot	Four Quartets	Faber & Faber, 1944
	Louise Glück	The Wild Iris	Carcanet, 1992
	Philip Larkin	Collected Poems	Faber & Faber, 1988
Two Nominations	John Ashbery	Houseboat Days	Carcanet, 1975
	Raymond Carver	All of Us	Harvill, 1996
	Carol Ann Duffy	The World’s Wife	Picador, 1999
	T S Eliot	Collected Poems	Faber & Faber, 1963
	T S Eliot	The Wasteland	Faber & Faber, 1922
	Allen Ginsberg	Howl	City Lights, 1959
	Fay Goodwin & Ted Hughes	Elmet	Faber & Faber, 1994
	W S Graham	Selected Poems	Faber & Faber, 1996
	Seamus Heaney	Seeing Things	Faber & Faber, 1991
	Seamus Heaney	North	Faber & Faber, 1975
	Henri, Adrian, Roger and Brian McGough and Patten	The Mersey Sound	Penguin, 1967
	Geoffrey Hill	Mercian Hymns	Andre Deutsch / Penguin, 1971
	Philip Larkin	The Whitsun Weddings	Faber & Faber, 1964
	Louis MacNeice	Autumn Journal	Faber & Faber, 1939
	Frank O’Hara	Collected Poems	Carcanet, 1971
	Sylvia Plath	Collected Poems	Faber & Faber,
	Dylan Thoms	Collected Poems	Dent, 1952