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Susannah Herbert's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Susannah Herbert recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Susannah Herbert's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

New Collected Poems

A landmark definitive edition of one of our most innovative and beloved poets

The landmark oeuvre of Marianne Moore, one of the major inventors of poetic modernism, has had no straight path from beginning to end; until now, there has been no good vantage point from which to see the body of her remarkable work as a whole. Throughout her life Moore arranged and rearranged, visited and revisited, a large majority of her existing poetry, always adding new work interspersed among revised poems. This makes sorting out the complex textual history that she left behind a pressing...
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Recommended by Susannah Herbert, and 1 others.

Susannah HerbertHeather Cass White shows you to what extent the later Moore rewrote, re-edited, eclipsed her earlier work and changed it from the poetry which earned her so much of her reputation. And it’s a real shocker – excitingly shocking – to find out that I can get the newly minted poems of the 1920s and 30s before the Moore of the 40s 50s and 60s decided to ‘improve them’ by taking out most of the detail... (Source)

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2

#AFTERHOURS

Recommended by Susannah Herbert, and 1 others.

Susannah HerbertInua Ellams is a phenomenal force of energy: I first came across him when I started organising National Poetry Day about five years ago. He was unofficially National Poetry Days’ Twitter poet, and what he did was a call-and-response via Twitter whereby he’d give whoever was following him little stimuli to their next lines of poetry, and then at the end of the day he’d pull them all together. So... (Source)

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3

The Golden Shovel Anthology

New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks

“Throughout this anthology, more than 60 other well-known Brooks poems can be read the same way, with lines from ‘The Mother’ and ‘The Bean Eaters’ tripping down the right-hand side of the page. The anthology ends with ‘Non-Brooks Golden Shovels’ and ‘Variations and Expansions on the Form.’ The cross-section of poets with varying poetics and styles gathered here is only one of the many admirable achievements of this volume.
—Claudia Rankine, The New York Times, August 2017

“The editors, including tireless poetry advocate Kahn, of this unique, new addition to...
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Recommended by Susannah Herbert, and 1 others.

Susannah HerbertRather to my embarrassment, I didn’t know that much about Gwendolyn Brooks before this book. One of its editors, Peter Kahn, has been a real force of change in British poetry: he set up something called Spoken Word Educators in London schools. They got a bit of money together and put together a squad of poets to work in tough inner-city schools. An American, he brought this practise from Chicago,... (Source)

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4
A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation.  Following her 2013 debut This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx. The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monologue as Bergin explores the alluring and sometimes tragic consequences of translation. When she committed suicide in 1898, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx, pioneering sociologist, and translator of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary) imitated Flaubert’s heroine, Emma. Both women, in their own ways,... more
Recommended by Susannah Herbert, and 1 others.

Susannah HerbertI really love this book. It hums with energy. Tara’s worked a lot on translation and you see in this book a real playful joy in exploring what it means to move from one tongue to another, what it means to rephrase something, what it means to take a life and relive it or take words and re-say them. (Source)

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5

On Balance

Set against a backdrop of ecological and economic instability, Sinéad Morrissey’s sixth collection, On Balance, revisits some of the great feats of human engineering to reveal the states of balance and inbalance that have shaped our history. The poems also address gender inequality and our inharmonious relationship with the natural world. A poem on Lilian Bland – the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane – celebrates the audacity and ingenuity of a great Irish heroine. Elsewhere, explorers in Greenland set foot on a fjord system accessible to Europeans for the first... more
Recommended by Susannah Herbert, and 1 others.

Susannah HerbertWhat I like about Morrissey is that she moves forward. She is aware of the need to interrogate where you are at any given time. And she draws on the past. Her winning collection On Balance is largely about giving the past a voice and also drawing attention to the impossibility of knowing whether or not that voice is correct. It’s provisional. (Source)

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