Our Poetry picks of 2024: Favourite poems that become such dear friends

Some people (academics perhaps) might think it rather sentimental to describe poems as ‘friends’, yet when poetry sustains your emotional life you know it’s true.

The Poetry Exchange is a project and podcast that celebrates the role poetry can play in people’s lives, and its 10th anniversary anthology (Poems As Friends edited by Fiona Bennett and Michael Shaeffer, Quercus £14.99, 192pp) proves it.

Sixty glorious poems are each accompanied by a personal testimony from someone who thinks of that poem (some by great names, others not) as a true friend, and why it brings celebration, confirmation or consolation. The book is marvellous – and an excellent present.

I’d call being a friend to the earth essential – and so, I think, would former Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. His beautiful little volume, Blossomise (Faber £10, 72pp) is an original and energetic take on an old subject: the all-too-short magic of blossom.

Published in collaboration with the National Trust, with beautiful illustrations by Angela Harding, the collection offers poems, haikus, song and lyrics as exuberant as the year froth of blossom in our trees: ‘The streets are learning/the language of plum blossom./The trees have spoken.’

There are plenty of messages from the natural world in Carol Ann Duffy’s new anthology, Earth Prayers (Picador £16.99, 160pp).

There are many nature anthologies, but the personal choices of a star like Duffy have special interest. They embrace the old and the new, famous poets such as Seamus Heaney, Edward Thomas, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as well as newer names.

The moods are of ‘gratitude, equality and, rightly, remorse’. After all, you pray to what you believe in, get angry over the welfare of what you care about, and grieve over loss. Such passions give Duffy’s selection energy, adding up to what Norman MacCaig calls ‘radiance in a dark place’ – love for the Earth as mother, neighbour and precious friend.

Favourite poets become, in time, as close as family and friends you can’t do without. I was delighted by new, fat collections of the work of two much-loved poets. Roger McGough (The Collected Poems – Viking £25, 752pp) has been a beloved favourite of mine since he joined Adrian Henri and Brian Patten in the thrilling 1967 paperback The Mersey Sound.

Years later he is rightly considered a national treasure, but that’s not to diminish his serious achievement. With humour and insight he has his finger on human experience, from youthful irreverence to the elegiac love of parent and grandparenthood.

Equally, the wit and wisdom of Wendy Cope’s Collected Poems (Faber £20, 512pp) is a perfect accompaniment to every aspect of our lives. In the early poem, Manifesto, she vows to ‘write the poems that will win your heart’ – and does just that.