What would you say are your five favourite books published by Bloodaxe in this and the previous decade?

Doesn't have to be what you think are the most 'important' or 'canonical' books - just your five personal favourites...

Oh well, has to be my own. No point beating about the bush. Though it's fun hearing her yelp. ;)

I really enjoyed and got a lot of information from Deryn Rees-Jones' anthology Modern Women Poets and Consorting with Angels, the accompanying book of essays. I didn't agree with some of her thoughts and her selections, but they are certainly books I've returned to, again and again, which probably makes them 'favourites'.

My kids are beating each other up. I'll come back later. There are more to add here ...

I've realised I don't read all that many Bloodaxe books. Not sure why that is. I was going to start with Simon Armitage's Zoom!, but I see it came out in 1989. So:

Reel - George Szirtes
The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations ed. Denis O'Driscoll
The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 - Roy Fisher
Almanacs - Jen Hadfield

..and at this point I'm really struggling not to vote for Mischief Night, but it seems a bit naff to do so

I enjoyed Jen Hadfield's 'Almanacs' too but I'm not sure I understood it. I'd really have to identify with a collection to put it in the 'favourite' category, and I can't identify with something I don't entirely understand. Some people seem to enjoy being challenged like that by poetry. I don't, it makes me feel uncomfortable and a bit at sea. I'm friends with Jen and hugely admire the ambitious flair and individuality of her writing, but a book like Alice Oswald's 'Dart' - which I named as a favourite on the Faber thread - seems at times to come from right inside me rather than from the poet herself.

Does that make any sense?

That does make sense. I didn't understand all of Almanacs either, but - I don't know - I still really enjoyed it for its imagination, linguistic energy, and the way she could make a landscape 'live' in my mind. I thought it was really different from anything else I'd read too.

I suppose I feel the same way about a very different writer - Wallace Stevens - I don't understand everything he writes, but I really like it. I've been re-reading Harmonium, and recently re-read Selected Poems, and while some of the poems, the later ones especially, are extremely difficult to follow, I definitely understood a lot more this time than when I read them before years ago.

When it comes to poets in whose writing there is nothing to understand, except the theories behind the writing, that's when I switch off.

Yes, I suppose I mean 'understand' at an instinctual rather than intellectual level. So some things could well vanish over my head, but if the general thrust of a book goes under my ribs, then I 'understand' it. A visceral thing, more than cerebral.

Yes, I like Jen Hadfield too.

I don't want to go back to 1990, but among recent Bloodaxes I like

Joan Margarit: Tugs in the fog [A fine Catalan poet]
Jane Hirshfield: After
Bill Herbert: The Laurelude
Andrew Greig: This Life, This Life.

I am sad to report that this book title has been the subject of much mirth and a running joke over the past day or two among simple and dirty-minded London poets, myself included.

Not as bad as Bottom Stream as a title, but what were they thinking?

Okay - why no Picador on this list? - because though they have published many good books in the past few years, they are really the new guys. The list proper has been going only about eight or nine years. These threads are looking at publishers' output over the past 20-odd years. By all means start a thread though...

Nothing sinister, unless it's the potentially sinister business of asking living poets to admit to reading, admiring even other living poets.

I do strongly prefer answers which are single volumes... but didn't state that, as the thread would have sunk without trace.

Still working on my answers.

And here they are:

John Hughes - Negotiations With the Chill Wind
Selima Hill - Aeroplanes of the World (the New part of her N&S)
WN Herbert - Cabaret McGonagall
Jen Hadfield - Almanacs

...and one more - I'll have to have a look - my A-Smith is on shelves, my Smith-Z is in boxes - may well find my fifth choice in there.

Cemetery Nights, Stephen Dobyns
The Bradford Count, Ian Duhig
Flowering Limbs, Stephen Knight
The English Earthquake, Eva Salzman
Canada, John Hartley Williams

Five isn't enough. (Everything by Selima Hill. Kinsella's The Hunt. Armitage, Maxwell ...)

The Budapest File, George Szirtes
Bunny, Selima Hill

...