I was struck by a remark of Seamus Heaney in an interview he gave some years ago now. He was musing on how many poems can affect the life of an individual across that person’s lifetime. Was it ten, he said, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or more? This is the question that has underpinned this pet project of mine since I began it in July 2009.

Since then I have been copying out poems into a plain Moleskine notebook, one at a time, in inky longhand, when the mood took me. Allowing myself no more than one poem per poet, I wanted to see how many poems I could honour with the label ‘lifesaving’. I quickly realised it was a deeply subjective and unscientific exercise. Frequently, the poem that was copied into my book was not especially famous, certainly not representative or even the ‘best’ of that poet’s work.

My criteria were extremely basic.  Was the poem one I could recall having had an immediate experience with from the first moment I read it? In short, did I feel the poem was one I could do without?

The list below is, therefore, not a perfect anthology-style list of the great and the good. It is a list of poems I happen to feel passionate about, according to my tastes. As Billy Collins says somewhere: ‘Good poems are poems that I like’.

Copying them out into my book has not always been fun, but now that I am finished, I am in possession of a deeply satisfactory feeling of having learnt more about myself and about each poem that I copied.

Over the next weeks and months I am going to be blogging here about the stories behind the choices I made, the influences upon them, and what I learnt in the process. (Before anyone writes in, I have noticed that William Blake snuck in with two choices).

 

For what it is worth, here are my

 

Lifesaving poems

 

Let a place be made, Yves Bonnefoy, from European Poems on the Underground

Isn’t My Name Magical, James Berry, from A Caribbean Dozen

‘This morning was cold’, Jaan Kaplinksi (trs. Jaan Kaplinski, Sam Hammill and Riina Tamm), from The Wandering Border (Read more here)

Hamlet, Boris Pasternak (trs. Jon Stallworthy and Peter France), fromSelected Poems

Beachcomber, George Mackay Brown, from Selected Poems

Prosser, Raymond Carver, from Fires

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, James Wright, from Poetry With an Edge

Night Drive, Seamus Heaney, from Door into the Dark

A Letter to Peter Levi, Elizabeth Jennings, from Selected Poems

K563, Peter Sansom, from Everything You’ve Heard is True (Read more here)

Era, Jo Shapcott, from Of Mutability

Corminboeuf 157, Robert Rehder, from The Compromises Will be Different (Read more here)

Bike, Michael Laskey, from The Tightrope Wedding

A Morning, Mark Strand, from Selected Poems

To My Heart at the close of the Day, Kenneth Koch, from New Addresses

May the Silence Break, Brendan Kennelly, from A Time for Voices

Words, Wide Night, Carol Ann Duffy, from The Other Country

Mansize, Maura Dooley, from Explaining Magnetism

Aunt Julia, Norman MacCaig, from Worlds

Tides, Hugo Williams, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Read more here)

Fishermen, Alasdair Paterson, from Strictly Private (Read more here)

On Roofs of Terry Street, Douglas Dunn, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (Read more here) 

Coming Home, Carol Rumens, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry

One Cigarette, Edwin Morgan, from Worlds

Autobiography, Thom Gunn, from Worlds

This is what I wanted to sign off with, Alden Nowlan, from Do Not Go Gentle

Wind, Ted Hughes, from Worlds

Riddle (No. 7), Anon (trs. Kevin Crossley-Holland), from The Exeter Book: Riddles

Alone, Tomas Tranströmer (trs. Robin Fulton), from New Collected Poems (Read more here)

Listen, John Cotton, from The Crystal Zoo

A Private Life, John Burnside, from Swimming in the Flood

Sunday Lunchtime, Connie Bensley, from Choosing to be a Swan

Loch Thom, W.S. Graham, from Selected Poems

Eating Outside, Stephen Berg, from New and Selected Poems

A Lyric Afterwards, Tom Paulin, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry

I am a Finn, James Tate, from Emergency Kit

The Missing Poem, Mark Halliday, from Jab (Read more here)

You!, Anon (Igbo dialect, Nigeria), from The Oxford Book of Animal Poems

Love, Miroslav Holub (trs. Ian Milner,) from Touchstones 5

The Picnic, John Logan, from Touchstones 5 (Read more here)

June 30, 1974, James Schuyler, from Collected Poems (Read more here)

Heliographer, Don Paterson, from Nil Nil

An Horatian Notion, Thomas Lux, from New and Selected Poems

Jet, Tony Hoagland, from Donkey Gospel (Read more here)

Everyone Sang, Siegfried Sassoon, from Selected Poems

Reading the Books Our Children Have Written, Dave Smith, fromThe Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry

Song of Reasons, Robert Pinsky, from The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry

Elegy for Jane, Theodore Roethke, from Poetry in the Making

‘No Worst, There is None’, Gerard Manley Hopkins, from Poems and Prose

Picture of a Cornfield, Stanley Cook, from Writing Poems

Poetry, Iain Chrichton Smith, from Ends and Beginnings

The New Poem, Charles Wright, from The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry

Epilogue, Robert Lowell, from Day by Day

Down by the Station, Early in the Morning, John Ashbery, from The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry

Birth of the Foal, Ferenc Juhasz (trs. David Wevill), from The Rattlebag

And Yet the Books, Czeslaw Milosz, from Collected Poems

‘Be not afear’d: the isle is full of noises’, William Shakespeare, fromThe Tempest, Act 3 Scene 2

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock, Wallace Stevens, from The Rattlebag

Mushrooms, Sylvia Plath, from Collected Poems

Cups, Gwen Harwood, from Emergency Kit

The Middle Kingdom, John Ash, from Selected Poems

Looking at them Asleep, Sharon Olds, from The Matter of This World(Read more here)

Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest, Gary Snyder, from Making Your Own Days

Kin, C.K. Williams, from New and Selected Poems

Why I Am Not a Painter, Frank O’Hara, from Selected Poems

With Only One Life, Marin Sorescu, from The Biggest Egg in the World(Read more here)

My Shoes, Charles Simic, from Selected Poems: 1963-2003

I Cavalli di Leonardo, Rutger Kopland (trs, James Brockway), fromMemories of the Unknown

Deep Third Man, Hubert Moore, from The Hearing Room

Nightwatchman, Peter Carpenter, from After the Goldrush

‘So we’ll go no more a roving’, George Gordon, Lord Byron, fromShort and Sweet

Results, Siân Hughes, from The Missing

Groundsmen, David Scott, from Selected Poems

Avocados, Esther Morgan, from Beyond Calling Distance

The Beautiful Appartments, George Messo, from Entrances

Morning on Earth, Piotr Sommer, from Continued

Exe, Alan Peacock, from Collected Poems

The Lack of You, Lawrence Sail, from Building into Air

The Only Son in the Fish ‘n’ Chip Shop, Geoff Hattersley, from Back of Beyond

Swineherd, Eiléan ní Chuilleanáin, from Emergency Kit

Chemotherapy, Julia Darling, from Sudden Collapses in Public Places (Read more here)

Psalm 102, of David, from The Old Testament

Instructor, Ann Sansom, from Vehicle

Talking in Bed, Philip Larkin, from The Whitsun Weddings

Poetry and Religion, Les Murray, from Collected Poems

Buffalo Dusk, Carl Sadnburg, from This Poem Doesn’t Rhyme

History, Tomaž Šalamun, from Homage to Hat and Uncle Guido and Eliot: Selected Poems

Some of the Usual, Naomi Jaffa, from The Last Hour of Sleep

Caring for the Environment, Mandy Sutter, from Greek Gifts

An Upstairs Kitchen, Susannah Amoore, from Poetry Introduction 6

Morning, Caroline Yasunaga, from Hard Lines 3

Heaven on Earth, Craig Rain, from The PBS Anthology 1986/87

This is just to say, William Carlos Williams, from Wordscapes

Pigtail, Tadeusz Rōżewicz, from Faber Modern European Poetry

Atlas, U.A. Fanthorpe, from Safe as Houses

The Black Wet, W.N. Herbert, from New Blood (Read more here)

To His Lost Lover, Simon Armitage, from The Book of Matches

From the Irish, Ian Duhig, from Short and Sweet

Slaughterhouse, Hilary Menos, from Berg

High Fidelity, Christopher Southgate, from Easing the Gravity Field

Mercifully ordain that we may become aged together, Ann Gray, from At the Gate (Read more here)

I Would Like to Be a Dot in a Painting by Miro, Moniza Alvi, from The Country at My Shoulder (Read more here)

Photograph in a Stockholm Newspaper for March 13, 1910, Don Coles, from Someone has Stayed in Stockholm: New and Selected Poems

Machines, Michael Donaghy, from Shibboleth

Swans Mating, Michael Longley, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry

Before, Sean O’Brien, from Emergency Kit

The Ingredient, Martin Stannard, from The Gracing of Days  (Read more here)

The Birkdale Nightingale, Jean Sprackland, from Tilt

Prayer/Why I am Happy to be in the City This Spring, Andy Brown, from Goose Music

Ultramarine, Michael Symmons Roberts, from Raising Sparks

Domestic Bliss, Mark Robinson, from The Horse Burning Park (Read more here)

To Autumn, John Keats, from The Rattlebag

Goodbye, Adrian Mitchell, from Worlds

The Tyger, William Blake, from The Rattlebag

Sowing, Edward Thomas, from Selected Poems and Prose

Birches, Robert Frost, from The Rattlebag

Tube Ride to Martha’s, Matthew Sweeney, from Blue Shoes

Annunciation, Gillian Allnutt, from How the Bicycle Shone: New and Selected Poems (Read more here)

Midsummer, Tobago, Derek Walcott, from Collected Poems: 1948-1984

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, W.B. Yeats, from Selected Poems

Literary Portrait, Evangeline Paterson, from Lucifer at the Fair

‘A man called Percival Lee’, Spike Milligan, from The 101 Best and Only Limericks of Spike Milligan

‘I always wanted to go on the stage’, Roger McGough, from Unlucky for Some

The Dog, Christopher North, from A Mesh of Wires

On the Impossibility of Staying Alive, Ian McMillan, from Selected Poems

Let Evening Come, Jane Kenyon, from Let Evening Come

Saint Francis and the Sow, Galway Kinnell, from Selected Poems

Ghost of a Chance, John Harvey, from Ghosts of a Chance

What it’s Like to be Alive, Deryn Rees Jones, from Signs Round a Dead Body

Praying Mantis, Yorifumi Yaguchi, from Three Mennonite Poets

Poem, Elizabeth Bishop, from The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry

Morning, Billy Collins, from Picnic, Lightning

Prayer, Marie Howe, from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (Read more here)

The Way We Live, Kathleen Jamie, from The Way We Live

Dusting the Phone, Jackie Kay, from Other Lovers (Read more here)

Women Who Dye Their Hair, Janet Fisher, from Women Who Dye Their Hair (Read more here)

Who?, Charles Causley, from Collected Poems for Children

The Journey, Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems Vol. 1

Early Summer, Peter Scupham, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry

Wet Evening in April, Patrick Kavanagh, from Collected Poems

August 1914, Isaac Rosenburg, from Poems on the Underground

Musée des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden, from Selected Poems

Paris, Paul Muldoon, from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry

Putney Garage, Paul Durcan, from Daddy, Daddy

Let’s Celebrate, Mandy Coe, from Clay (Read more here)

Hysteria, T.S. Eliot, from Collected Poems: 1909-1962

‘my way is in the sand flowing’, Samuel Beckett, from ‘Four Poems’

Leaning into the Afternoons, Pablo Neruda, from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

The Simple Truth, Philip Levine, from The Simple Truth

Silence, Stephen Dobyns, from Velocities: New and Selected Poems

The Last Hours, Stephen Dunn, from Different Hours

Boggle Hole, Cliff Yates, from Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (Read more here)

in Just, ee cummings, from Wordscapes

The Divine Image, William Blake, from The Human Dress (Lies Damned Lies) (Read more here)

Owl, George MacBeth, from Poetry in the Making

Wintering, Matthew Hollis, from Ground Water

Not Me, Shel Silverstein, from Poetry Explored: 5-8

Everything is Going to be All Right, Derek Mahon, from Selected Poems

8.06 p.m. June 10^th 1970, Tom Raworth, from Against the Grain