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. (Although they are numbered, we have NOT ranked these choices by “quality” or any other criterion. New collections will appear here as we review them.
1. Bridge Across the Blue
(Word&Violin, 2004) This brand-new poetry+music collection produced by Pireeni Sundaralingam & Colm Ó Riain pairs poets & musicians in an exchange of immigrant stories drawn from the rich cultural mix of old, new & 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 & Irish chants by Lillis Ó Laoire & John-Carlos Perea.
2. Mali To Memphis: An African-American Odyssey
(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. This is my most-listened-to CD... a must-have... a cannot-part-with.
3. The Caedmon Poetry Collection: A century of poets reading their own work
(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: Yeats, Auden, Williams, Thomas, Eliot, Frost, Neruda, Plath... If you believe poetry lives in the poet’s own voice, this is your chance to experience poetry history, live.4. Good Poems, by Garrison Keillor
(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 poets old & new, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, Sharon Olds....5. Classic American Poetry
(Naxos Audiobooks, 2000) This collection ranges from the 17th to the 20th century and includes poems by Longfellow, Poe, Emerson, Whitman, Frost, 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.6. Seven Ages of Man, An Anthology of Poetry with Music
(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 & Judi Dench to Glenda Jackson & John Cleese.7. English Romantic Poetry
(Caedmon, 1996) Not available on CD (this is an analog audiocassette), but listening to this recording will bring you back to the 19th century tradition of drawing room poetry readings -- works by Blake, Burns, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth in the voices of British stage actors Anthony Quayle, Claire Bloom, and Ralph Richardson.