Jenny~ Eight female poets to explore
March is Women’s History Month, and what better time to read some poetry written by women you may not have explored before? Here are a few of my favourite female poets, whose work is definitely worth reading.
Poetry about nature
British poet Alice Oswald’s most famous collection is entitled Dart, and it won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. A combination of poetry and prose, the collection follows the journey of the River Dart in Devon from Dartmoor to Dartmouth, exploring the lives of the people the river meets along the way. The American poet Mary Oliver writes in a similarly sensitive way about nature, and has also been compared to Emily Dickinson. She uses nature to reflect on life itself, her 2012 collection A Thousand Collections being a beautiful example of this.
Poetry about femininity
Audre Lorde was an American writer, poet and feminist scholar. Throughout her career she wrote emotive poetry and powerful essays in support of intersectional feminism, and implored people to work to dismantle power structures that subjugate women and people of colour. The newly published collection When I Dare to Be Powerful brings together some of her most important work. Former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has become one of Britain’s most important and prolific poets in recent decades. Her 1999 collection, The World’s Wife, tells the too-often forgotten stories of the wives of famous men from mythology, history, politics and literature, and her other collections, such as Rapture, similarly ask us to reflect on femininity and womanhood. Her 2021 collection, Empty Nest, diverges a little from her previous work, instead exploring family life.
Poetry in translation
Sappho was one of Ancient Greece’s great lyric poets, and her poetry has relatively recently started to be discovered and translated. She often wrote on theme of desire between women, and the word ‘lesbian’ comes from Lesbos, the island where she lived. The collection Come Close includes some of her most powerful poetry and ideas about sexuality.
Living more than 2000 years later, Anna Akhmatova was a highly important Russian poet and translator, and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Her poetry is known for its powerful and assertive female subjectivity. Anna Akhmatova’s Selected Poems contains her greatest works, including the lyric poem Requiem about the Stalinist regime.
New voices in poetry
23-year-old Amanda Gorman made waves at President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021 with her spoken-word poem The Hill We Climb. Gorman is the first National Youth Poet Laureate of the USA and her powerful poetic oeuvre, focusing on issues of marginalisation, feminism and race, makes her one to watch in 2021. Her new poetry collection, The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, is released in September 2021. Amanda Lovelace is another young poet who has made a big impression in recent years, particularly with her bestselling collection the princess saves herself in this one, which seeks to empower women and encourage us to forge our own life stories. Her next collection follows a similar theme; shine your icy crown comes out in April 2021.
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