Want to discover new poetry with your ears? We’ve selected the best recorded anthologies here—samplers where you can hear the work of many poets, old and new.
Poetry Speaks, Hear Great Poets Read Their Work
Sourcebooks (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Book + 3 CDs, Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2001) Compiled by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby, this remarkable collection brings together the recorded voices of poets of the last 110 years... from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Butler Yeats to W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks and Allen Ginsburg... with more poems in the book, plus essays on the dead poets by living poets. An indispensible compendium.
reVerse, Volume 1
reVerse
(reVerse, 2004) From Chicago, KC Clarke brings a labor of love CD, reVerse1, which begins with a haunting poem by Li-Young Lee with a female vocalist and ambient score and concludes with a straight, tough a capella Lou Reed doing a chunk of his “The Raven.” In between, there’s straight poetry, gospel poetry, folk poetry, and Mark Strand. Cin Salach is here, and we need lots more of her!
Bridge Across the Blue
Word & Violin
(Word&Violin, 2004) This poetry+music collection produced by Pireeni Sundaralingam and Colm Ó Riain pairs poets and musicians in an exchange of immigrant stories drawn from the rich cultural mix of old, new and becoming-Americans in the San Francisco Bay area. Some of the cuts are simply magical—particularly Ó Riain’s blues/Celtic ballad violin solo and the a cappella interweaving of Native American and Irish chants by Lillis Ó Laoire and John-Carlos Perea.
Mali To Memphis: An African-American Odyssey
Putomayo (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Putumayo, 1999) If you’re befuddling how griot speech led to Blues, this Middle Passage Inner Ear will illuminate. Every cut is a classic, but Boubacour Traore’s “Kar Kar Madison” and Jessie Mae Hemphill’s “Standing in the Doorway Crying” are sublime. Your Poetry Guide Bob Holman sez: “This has been my most-listened-to CD... a must-have... a cannot-part-with.”
The Caedmon Poetry Collection: A Century of Poets Reading Their Own Work
Caedmon (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Harper Audio, 2000) Wow! Three CDs on which you can hear most of the great (mostly male / almost exclusively white) poets of the 20th century reading their own poems: William Butler Yeats, W.H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath... If you believe poetry lives in the poet’s own voice, this is your chance to experience poetry history, live.
Seven Ages of Man, An Anthology of Poetry with Music
Naxos Audiobooks (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Naxos Audiobooks, 2000) Shakespeare’s “The Seven Ages of Man,” read by Sir Ian McKellen, is the framework for this program of more than 100 poems in the voices of Britain’s leading actors—many of them immediately recognizeable—from Michael Caine and Judi Dench to Glenda Jackson and John Cleese.
Good Poems, by Garrison Keillor
Highbridge Audio (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
(Highbridge Audio, 2002) Selected by Keillor from the poems read every day on The Writer’s Almanac, his 7 am NPR radio show, Good Poems is just that—a collection of good poems from poets old and new: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, Sharon Olds....
Classic American Poetry
Naxos Audiobooks
(Naxos Audiobooks, 2000) This collection ranges from the 17th to the 20th century and includes poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, Alice Walker, Anne Bradstreet, and anonymous pieces from Native and African American cultures, all read by editor/producer Garrick Hagon or another of his ensemble of performers.
Great Poets of the Romantic Age
Naxos Audiobooks (cover image courtesy of Pricegrabber)
