Reading
Further reading
Craft pages are a studio. Books are the apprenticeship. Read more poems than books about poems — but a handful of handbooks will save you years of guessing which tool you are holding.
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Handbooks and anthologies
The Ode Less TravelledStephen Fry
The most companionable crash-course in metre, rhyme and form in print. Fry assumes you can already speak English, and then shows you the rest.
Best first craft book if traditional form intimidates you.
A Poetry HandbookMary Oliver
A slim, exacting guide from a poet who never wasted a word. Oliver is particularly good on sound, line, and the difference between a real image and a decoration.
The handbook to reread every time you start a new sequence.
Rules for the DanceMary Oliver
Oliver’s dedicated book on metrical verse: scanning, variation, and why the iamb still matters in an age of free verse.
Go here after the Handbook if metre still feels like algebra.
The Making of a PoemMark Strand & Eavan Boland
A Norton anthology organised by form, with clear notes on villanelles, sestinas, pantoums, sonnets and more, plus canonical examples.
The book to keep open beside you while you attempt a form.
Rhyme's ReasonJohn Hollander
Hollander explains each form in a poem written in that form. It is a party trick and a masterclass at once.
Short, witty, and the fastest way to hear what a form is for.
The Poetry HandbookJohn Lennard
A denser, more academic companion covering metre, rhyme, stanza, layout, punctuation and how to write about poems as well as write them.
The reference desk book for close reading.
How to Read a PoemEdward Hirsch
Hirsch writes as a reader in love with poems. If your own writing has stalled, reading better is often the way through.
For poets who have forgotten to be readers.
The Poet's CompanionKim Addonizio & Dorianne Laux
Subject-led chapters (death, love, family, the body) plus exercises. American in flavour, practical everywhere.
When you know the tools but cannot find a poem to use them on.
Writing PoemsPeter Sansom
A Bloodaxe staple from the founder of The Poetry Business. Clear, unfussy, and written for people who actually mean to finish a poem.
The best short UK-centred primer.
52 Ways of Looking at a PoemRuth Padel
Padel reads fifty-two contemporary poems in public, in plain language. An education in how a trained ear notices.
Apprentice yourself to living poems, one week at a time.
Staying AliveNeil Astley (ed.)
The Bloodaxe anthology that converted a generation of non-specialist readers. Five hundred poems that argue, quietly, that poetry is for life rather than exams.
Fill the well. Craft books teach the how; this teaches the why.
Being AliveNeil Astley (ed.)
The companion volume to Staying Alive — another wide, international harvest of poems that earn their keep.
When you have worn out the first Bloodaxe doorstop.
The Rattle BagSeamus Heaney & Ted Hughes (eds.)
A personal, unruly anthology: poems Heaney and Hughes wanted people to hear, not a syllabus. Still the most delightful jumble in the language.
Keep it by the bed. Steal rhythms shamelessly.
The Triggering TownRichard Hugo
Essays on how a poem gets started — the triggering subject versus the real subject — from a poet who ran a famous workshop in Montana.
The best book on initiating a poem rather than decorating one.
By Stewart Ferris
The wider writing life around the poems — habit, publishing, and the business nobody mentions in workshops.
How to be a WriterStewart Ferris
Industry-minded, unsentimental advice on building a writing life: habit, publishing, and the difference between wanting to have written and actually writing.
From the author of this site — the wider writing craft around the poems.
How to Get PublishedStewart Ferris
A clear-eyed walk through submitting, rejection, contracts and the business that sits behind the art. Written by a former publisher.
Read this before you spend a year sending work into a void.
How to Publish Your Own BookStewart Ferris
For poets considering a pamphlet or collection outside the traditional queue — the practicalities of doing it well, not just doing it.
Self-publishing is a craft too. This treats it as one.
More from the author at stewartferris.com.