As a kid, I had a penchant for collecting baseball cards. As an adult, that affinity for collecting turned to books when I began to work in publishing in New York City. It was a natural extension of my collecting bug.

The first thing that drew me to the Pocket Poets series was the design of the books. They are small, about 4 1/2 inches wide by 6 1/2 inches tall. Each one is a cloth hardcover and they are various bright and vibrant colors. The dust jacket for each title is craftily designed. Each anthology volume has some snazzy picture/graphic element, while each individual author
compilation has a cover designed to highlight the name of the poet and set them apart from the anthologies. The spines of each edition help to unify the set because they all incorporate a unique graphic element patterned in the same way as the other editions in the set. Every book also has a ribbon bookmark. It's great because the color of the bookmark is similarly vibrant and matches the color scheme of the book. Some have said that aside from the obvious appeal of a book, that books are a form of furniture around the home. I enjoy displaying them so that they become a conversation piece for visitors.

Though it was the design that first attracted me, I became interested in the poetry typed within the pages of each volume. One rarely hears about poetry in mainstream media these days or the influence of some of the great poets. The poetry collections in each of the Pocket Poets editions, whether an anthology or dedicated to a particular poet's work, are fascinating to consider. Though I wish I could say I had read each and every one, I can't. It's fun to grab one off the shelf and open it to a page just to read a quick poem. Sometimes it is right on point with things that are
happening in my life and other times it provides just a moment of amusement or reflection.

Some of our greatest writers have written poetry that few have ever read. Poetry month comes and goes each year, but my collection of Pocket Poets keeps me thinking about it all year long.

I haven't acquired them all yet, but the Pocket Poets are easy and inexpensive to obtain. I like to buy them around my birthday (June) as a present to myself and then again around Christmas. So my hope is to finish the collection in the near future, unless more new editions are released.

BRONTË, EMILY. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996

The poems in this collection have a sensibility elemental in their force with an imaginative discipline and flexibility of the highest order. Poems so arresting in their dramatic situations, in the deep strangeness of their psychology and in the expert musicality of their versification, that this
collection is remarkable.

COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997

The master impresario of English Romanticism-enormously erudite and tireless critic, lecturer, and polemicist who almost single-handedly created the intellectual climate in which the Romantic movement was received and understood.

Dickinson, Emily. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993

Virtually unknown as a poet in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is now recognized as one of the most unaccountably strange and marvelous of the world's great writers.

DONNE, JOHN. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995

John Donne brought to the famous and famously sensual love poems we know as his Songs and Sonnets an intellectual force so powerful that he exploded the traditional love lyrics from within.

T. S. ELIOT. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998

With poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Eliot introduced an edgy, disenchanted, utterly contemporary version of French Symbolism to the English-speaking world. He set canonical standards to which writers and critics of poetry have adhered throughout our era.

FROST, ROBERT. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997

Robert Frost's lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narratives, all of which are steeped in the wayward and isolated beauty of his native New England, stand like great, runic monuments at the center of America's inner life.

HARDY, THOMAS. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995

Hardy's gifts as a novelist , revealed in his instinct for the telling detail, the phrases that characterize an entire psychological or social history, resonate throughout his poetry.

HUGHES, LANGSTON. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999

Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. This is an essential collection of his work.

KEATS, JOHN. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

Keats' profound, contemplative mind and luxurious musical sensibility combined to create poems that are loved, by critic and common reader alike, both for their piercing local beauty and for the vast imaginative order.

PLATH, SYLVIA, Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998

Plath's tragically abbreviated career as a poet began with work that was, in the words of one of her teachers, Robert Lowell, "formidably expert." It ended with a group of poems published after her suicide in 1963 which are, in the nakedness of their confessions, in their black humor, in their
ferocious honesty about what people do to one another and to themselves.

PUSHKIN, ALEXANDER. Eugene Onegin and Other Poems. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1999

A masterpiece of Russian literature and the source of the human archetypes and the attitudes that define and govern the towering fictional creations of nineteenth-century Russia and one of the most celebrated poems of the world.

RILKE, RAINER MARIA. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996

The greatest German poet of the last hundred years, Rilke, was also a towering influence on twentieth-century poetry in every Western language, possessing the highest degree of ability to embody the most elevated ardors of the mind in language.

RIMBAUD, ARTHUR. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

The great French poet completed his revolutionary body of work by age nineteen. Rimbaud's poetry shattered the restraints that bound Western poetry to the realms of reason, history, and tradition.

ROSSETTI, CHRISTINA. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993

Rossetti's poems have always been cherished for their exquisitely turned lyrical beauty and the pleasures they provide to the senses. What has become clear to contemporary readers is her work's inner strength, the power by which it weaves the erotic with the spiritual, and its deep intimacy with the mysterious.

SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

Shakespeare's superb narrative poems and sonnets give us the most direct connection we possess to the movements of reflection and emotion in our greatest writer.

WHITMAN, WALT. Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

Whitman's multitudinousness, expressed with a genius for language and an imaginative energy as powerful as that possessed by any writer, has come to define the inner meaning of the American experience.

Anthologies:

BEAT POETS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002

The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Michael McCLure and the work of such writers as Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov.

CHRISTMAS POEMS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999

Christmas is both a holiday and a holy day, from the start it has been associated with poetry, from the song of seraphim above the manger to the cherished carols around the punch bowl.

COMIC POEMS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001

A sparkling constellation of witty poets, from Lord Rochester to Lewis Carroll, form Edward Lear to Ogden Nash, form Dorothy Parker to W. H. Auden, and embraces a wide range of forms including limericks, clerihews, ballads, sonnets, and nonsense verse.

FRIENDSHIP POEMS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995

Poems about best friends, false friends, dear friends, lost friends, absent friends, even animal friends. A celebration of friendship in all its aspects.

GARDEN POEMS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996

Gardens and poems are both products of the universal human need to retrieve a serene imaginative order from the chaos of experience, so it is only natural that poets of every culture have found in gardens metaphors and locales for their work.

LOVE LETTERS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996

Dozens of irresistible love letters from over the centuries, both historic and fictional, by poets and princes, all enchanting, tragic, and comic. Includes letters from Mozart writing teasingly to his wife, Franz Kafka pining for his beloved Felice and others.

LOVE POEMS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993

This volume includes poems which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent a universal experience of the human soul.

LOVE SONGS AND SONNETS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997

This volume includes Ronsard's famous sonnets to Helene, Dorothy Parker's sardonic reflections on men and Anne Bradstreet's touching poem, To my Husband. Songs, Sonnets and lyric poems that focus on love in the widest sense, encompassing relationships of all kinds.

LULLABIES AND POEMS FOR CHILDREN. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002

This is an enchanting and comprehensive collection of the lullabies many of us were rocked to sleep with, such as "Rock-a-Bye Baby" and "Hush Little Baby, Don't Say a Word," which are mingled with traditional lullabies from around the world. The poems range from Walter de la Mare to T.S. Eliot to Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Ogden Nash.

PERSIAN POETS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000

The Middle Ages saw an extraordinary flowering of Persian poetry. These remarkable poets including Omar Khayyam, Rumi, Saadi, Sanai, Attar, Hafez, and Jami are still being discovered in the West.

POEMS OF THE AMERICAN WEST. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002

The verse collected here ranges from American Indian tribal poems to old folk songs like 'The Streets of Laredo," from country western lyrics to the work of such foreign poets as Bertolt Brecht and Zbigniew Herbert.

POEMS OF MOURNING. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998

Saluting, lamenting, and honoring the dead are the poet's primal tasks. Whether it be Ben Jonsen pining for his son, Keats and Rilke envisaging their own demise, Wilfred Owen commemorating comrades in war, or Homer's Odysseus grieving over his dog, all give expression to universal need for mourning. This collection explores the many forms of mourning.

POEMS OF NEW YORK. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002

New York City has always been a larger than life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers a mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry ranging from Walt Whitman's exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets' moving responses to the September 11th attack.

THE ROMAN POETS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997

The urban and pastoral poetry of the Roman republic, and of the empire that succeeded it, was both the culmination of the magnificent classical tradition of the Mediterranean and the seedbed for almost all the subsequent poetic traditions of Western and Central Europe.

SONNETS FROM DANTE TO THE PRESENT. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001

The sonnets in this collection - whether they capture moments of perception, recognition, despair, or celebration - reveal how great an amount of feeling, insight, and experience can be concentrated into a mere fourteen lines.

WAR POEMS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999

Here are more than one hundred of the most memorable war poems, ranging from Horace on the Battle of Actium and Heinrich Heine's "The Grenadiers" to Adrienne Rich's Vietnam-era "Newsreel."

ZEN POEMS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999

This collection of translations of the classical Zen poets of China, Japan, and Korea, includes work of Zen Practitioners and monks as well as scholars, artists, travelers, and recluses, ranging from Weng Wei, Hanshan, and Yang Wanli, to Shinkei, Basho, and Ryokan.