What’s to know before you add a book of poems to your collection, you ask? You either love it and must own it, or you leave it on the shelf, right? Poetry is the most personal of arts, and we won’t pretend to the kind of objective consumer guidance offered by About.com guides outside the arts... but here are some things to think about as you add to your personal poetry library.
Choose an anthology for browsing & reference
As you begin your explorations in the wide and deep world of poetry, a good comprehensive anthology can be your best map, giving you a sense of the poets’ historical and artistic context and a place to look for and sample the poems of a poet whose name you hear for the first time. Specialized anthologies can lead you from the poets you know to others whose work shares themes or origins or forms with theirs.
Choose the selected or collected poems for an overview of a single poet’s work
After a poet has become well known and published a series of books, you will often see publication of a “selected poems” (a new gathering of some of the poems from previous books) or a “collected poems” (usually, all of that poet’s published poems) — often printed in chronological order. This is a great way to immerse yourself in one poet’s work and get a sense of the shape of a poetic “career.”
Collect chapbooks at readings
There’s an explosion of indie book production these days: small presses, poetry groups and individual poets self-publishing short-run poetry chapbooks. While these ephemeral chapbooks are sometimes available online or in local independent bookstores, more often they are distributed by the poets themselves at readings — and you should buy them when you can, because they’re not likely to be in print long.
