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Helen Mort's Top Book Recommendations
Want to know what books Helen Mort recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Helen Mort's favorite book recommendations of all time.
1
Sunshine is the new collection from Next Generation Poet Melissa Lee-Houghton. A writer of startling confession, her poems inhabit the lonely hotel rooms, psych wards and deserted lanes of austerity Britain.
Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton’s poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems,... more
Sunshine combines acute social observation with a dark, surreal humour born of first-hand experience. Abuse, addiction and mental health are all subject to Lee-Houghton’s poetic eye. But these are also poems of extravagance, hope and desire, that stake new ground for the Romantic lyric in an age of social media and internet porn. In this new book of poems,... more
Recommended by Helen Mort, and 1 others. Helen MortI’ve (Source)
2
Lauded as a 'national treasure' and 'world class' by his contemporaries, 'Bard of Barnsley' Ian McMillan is one of Britain's well-loved poets, performers, broadcasters and entertainers. The host of The Verb, BBC Radio 3's Cabaret of The Word, McMillan has been injecting soul and vibrancy into the UK literary scene for over two decades. His humorous and witty observations of everyday life, fused with his northern, working-class voice has made him a household name. This long-awaited collection brings together poems from his previous publications plus new and unseen ones. less
Recommended by Helen Mort, and 1 others. Helen MortI chose this one because McMillan has been a really big influence on me as a poet. (Source)
3
Alice Oswald’s poems are always vivid and distinct, alert and deeply, physically, engaged in the natural world. Mutability – a sense that all matter is unstable in the face of mortality – is at the heart of this new collection and each poem is involved in that drama: the held tension that is embodied life, and life’s losing struggle with the gravity of nature.
Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it’s spoken as well as how it’s thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also... more
Working as before with an ear to the oral tradition, these poems attend to the organic shapes and sounds and momentum of the language as it’s spoken as well as how it’s thought: fresh, fluid and propulsive, but also... more
Recommended by Helen Mort, and 1 others. Helen MortWhen she writes about rain you feel as though you’re somehow a part of the fall of the rain. (Source)
4
Katharine Towers' second collection is a book of small wonders. From a house drowning in roses to crickets on an August day, from Nerval's lobster to the surrealism of flower remedies, these poems explore the fragility of our relationship with the natural world. Towers also shows us what that relationship can aspire to be: each poem attunes us to another aspect of that world, and shows what strange connections might be revealed when we properly attend to it. The Remedies is a lyric, unforgettable collection which offers just the spiritual assuagement its title promises, and shows... more
Recommended by Helen Mort, and 1 others. Helen MortThese are such pared-back, elegant and wistful poems. (Source)
5
Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers. less
Recommended by Helen Mort, and 1 others. Helen MortI’d say this was my book of the year. It was such a revelation. (Source)
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