David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.

Monday, 9 July 2012

Top 20 Poems

At the Portsmouth Poetry Society meting last week, I agreed to swap lists with another member.
Top 20 Favourite Poems since 1900 became the subject, and in English sort of goes without saying but wasn't said.
So, not being able to resist a list, here's mine, off the top of my head, and it could of course have been considerably different done at any other time,


Thom Gunn – Tamer and Hawk, My Sad Captains http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-sad-captains/ , Touch.

Philip Larkin – Church Going, At Grass.

Seamus Heaney – A Brigid’s Girdle.

Sean O’Brien –Latinists

W.H. Auden – Musee des Beaux Arts.

Paul Muldoon – Incantata, http://thepoeticquotidian.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/paul-muldoon-incantata.html (a vast thing- I can’t explain it much- but probably the greatest poem of the last few decades)

Sylvia Plath- Spinster

Derek Mahon- Courtyards in Delft


Alun Lewis – Corfe Castle

Carol Ann Duffy – Mrs. Midas

Tony Harrison – Loving Memory (I did have to look up the title of that)

Richard Wilbur – Transit

T.S. Eliot – The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

August Kleinzahler – Snow in North Jersey

Ted Hughes – October Dawn

W. B. Yeats - Byzantium