Women Poets

‘anything or anyone/ that does not bring you alive// is too small for you.’

Very often have I thought about this (as a topic!) and I’ve realised that, over the years, I have read more poetry by women than by men. Perhaps because, statistically, there are more women poets writing today that are recognised, and the numbers are only increasing. Which I think is rather good. But, still, some of the best poems I’ve read in the past few years were written by women, and I am a big fan of work by:

Zeina Hashem Beck | Beverley Bie Brahic (as translator) | Polly Clark | Hannah Copley | Rachel Curzon | Leontia Flynn | Isabel Galleymore | Marie Howe | Deborah Landau | Shara Lessley | Kathryn Maris | Maureen N. McLane | Kim Moore | Joyce Carol Oates | Maarja Pärtna | Yvonne Reddick | Anya Silver | Melissa Studdard | Hannah Sullivan | Sridala Swami | Imogen Wade | (and there are definitely more names—but the human mind is a curious thing—forgetful at best!)

This, of course, does not imply there hasn’t always been a gender disparity in the publishing game, and/or in its presentation. In the 400 years of Laureate history (UK), there’s only one: Carol Ann Duffy (2009–2019). The American history of Laureateship looks much better, comparatively, but is still limiting: a handful of women.¹ In general (conventionally), more men have been published and more books by men have been reviewed, and more men (than women) have been reviewers.²

Casual, infrequent, whimsical readers might not know even a couple of the names I’ve mentioned above; they might not know such names as Kimiko Hahn, Nuar Alsadir, and Swami or Sarojini Naidu—perhaps also because, historically too, we’ve been more inclined towards who did what than towards who is doing what! Even today, more people know Wordsworth’s daffodil poem and Frost’s poem about not following convention and having one’s own mind than poems about, say, the AIDS pandemic (by Howe, or even by Thom Gunn). There may be a thin chance they recognise more male poets than female, but my statement here is somewhat different. As someone born at the turn of this century, and having begun writing seriously just over a decade ago, I am more interested in contemporary poetry. I was born in Purnea in Bihar, one of the lesser developed but historically rich Indian states, and at school I was not hung up on the ancient poems. Though I do certainly admire Frost’s poem about determination (and about promises), about not stopping to rest on a fierce, snowy evening, in the past decade, I have read more women poets, have had the opportunity to have some of the best young poets as friends (one of whom is now also a playwright!³), and am sure glad reports suggest a change in the air: as opposed to the situation in the 1970s, women-authored books have not only sold satisfactorily but even outsold books by men as of 2021.⁴ The Guardian named three (women) poets, including Duffy, in a 2019 article who ‘netted sales into six-figures, something almost unheard of’ until then. Even the count of women as buyers of poetry has increased over the years.⁵

* Photo by Reva Hancock on Unsplash.

Still, I do definitely worry about the belligerent crass that is insta-poetry, but hey! a good outcome of a poor something is still a good thing—more women publishing better work! Plus, to understand what is bad (low-quality) literature, it was imperative I read two of the extremely popular writers of young adult literature in India a decade and a half ago. Today, I know better what not to read. Hopefully, other people will find that insta-poetry has at least this use for them. Not to go astray, though:

‘There’s more poets of colour, more women poets [than before]’⁶

So, getting back to my point: I owe much to women in poetry—for both their poetry and the kindness of some that I’ve received without asking. I have read the works of quite a few, and while Heaney, Longley, Merwin, and Armitage do certainly have vast individual portfolios, McLane’s World Enough, Beck’s O, Howe’s Magdalene, Oates’s American Melancholy, and Sullivan’s Three Poems always catch my eye as I get up to move towards my shelves (good covers are definitely very important!)

---

More recently though, I’ve read more work by newer poets—poets with recent debuts—and hugely enjoyed those.

Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith’s New Poets Prize-winning pamphlet from 2021, Ugly Bird. The second poem (p. 6) in the short collection ends with ‘these are real beans, strong and dark’ and by the end of it all I realised this fits very well with Lauren’s poetry too.

There’s a reason short collections like this one get published: the poet’s boldness. This is also what gets them the awards. Now, Lauren here is not as hung on trying to make it look beautiful as she is on making it make sense, and she asks for understanding—she writes about remnants of chewing gum as bits ‘floating// around our saliva pools like slithers of food/ in a washing up bowl’ (p. 12), which may not be a comfortable (or fun?) image but is definitely very recognisable. It created an image in my head where in a bowl of soap water (perhaps) crumpled bits of tissue paper floated and bobbed. And not just this, but the music, myth, and ekphrasis in this line: ‘The world is made of breaking, growing things’ (pp. 13–14). And it’s this that makes pamphlets like Ugly Bird fun to read.

But, at the same time, Ugly Bird isn’t just fun either—there are both personal and less/im-personal poems here; there’s surgery and loss, and love. And then the poem ‘No One Knows Care as Much as Her Hands Do’ (p. 15).

Imogen Wade’s Girl, Swooning is more recent, published in March this year and which I have a signed copy of (so cool!)

Most poetry collections gently prod and guide their readers towards a story, which this one does too, but I (sort of) squealed on seeing ‘Jigsaw’ (p. 16), which is a fine name for a poem written in landscape and where the poet is no longer guiding you, you have to find the pattern that makes the poem make sense. For very obvious reasons, I’d say that this is a book of elegies, considering it is dedicated to Imogen’s late grandmother, but it is also for the living—in ways it is more to moments than it is to certain people; for her twin sister, she writes ‘You were the/ one I knew, before we/ met the one who fed us.’ (p. 17)

In a recent interview with another young poet Ellora Sutton, Imogen noted that her collection is ‘dedicated to mothers’.⁷ Poetry, I believe, is very much a borrowed art, the more one reads and the better they observe, their poetry finds more and more depth. In Girl, Swooning, I found recognisable images—those I had seen before but not just lifted off of one page and pasted on another—I saw hints of Michael Longley, for example: ‘the gulls are quiet, the roads empty’ (p. 25). And I saw hints of Kathryn Maris and Leila Chatti. I also remember the Tate St Ives poem, ‘Forms’, from The Ekphrastic Review.

So, while I do nod my head when Imogen says that this book’s ‘reader is assumed, by default, to be a woman’, I’ve also found it easy to go back to and read again, even though the topics chosen aren’t as easy at all times.

Now, not new, but I remember seeing Rachael Boast’s name in places when I had first started out publishing, but I’d never really gotten a chance to enjoy her work until only a while back, when I read her debut, Sidereal, which is so full of stars. And the best of the poets I’ve read, I’ve always been reminded that poetry has to sound simple and surprise (rather than confuse)—I am thinking of, among other names, David Whyte here.⁸ On page 12, ‘Peace and Plenty’ begins with this: ‘Beside the low window of a rancid pub in Kendal / my bed is made for the overnight stop.’⁹ There’s nothing extraordinary here, and I believe that that is the entire idea, that poetry is ordinary, and the simpler it is, the better it is read.

Boast’s poetry is subtle in many ways, including when one considers its humour (and punch); in ‘Agrarian Song’ (p. 15), she writes: ‘Mars was once considered a god of the soil, / which seems about right, given the effort / of turning it.’ On pages 44–48, an interesting sequence called ‘Gabapentin’ (an anticonvulsant medication for neuropathic pain, a central nervous system depressant) and as the doses of the drug increase—part after part—the narrator’s speech changes: from nothing in particular to ‘staring vacantly / at where a township used to be’, to ‘I forget’, to ‘[…]’ for a lack of understanding/memory/etc. As a student of the biological sciences, the title of the poem piqued my interest, and the cleanliness (and a lack of apparent messiness) made it one of the standouts of the collection for me. One of the things about a good collection is that it has to both not be boring and keep you caught in its pages even during second and third readings—Sidereal definitely has that touch.

In the end, what stands out about Sidereal for me is the fact that even in its most urgent moments the poems don’t lose footing or skip a beat—that the flow with which the words move is what makes this collection most what it is.

---

One other collection that I’m now re-reading is Kim Moore’s wonderful Forward Prize-winning collection from Seren, All the Men I Never Married from 2022. After which I intend to go feast on (if that’s the right phrase at all) her newest The House of Broken Things. More soon, ciao!

1. “Man or Woman: Who is the better Poet?”. Poetry Magnum Opus. 28 December 2010. Accessed 2 March 2026.

2. Mackenzie, Rob (8 February 2011). “Are Literary Publications Biased Against Women?”. Magma Poetry. Accessed 2 March 2026.

3. Jeffery, Heather (10 August 2024). “REVIEW: THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE by Nadia Lines, Camden Fringe at Old Red Lion Theatre 5 – 9 August 2024”. London Pub Theatres Magazine Ltd. ISSN 2977-6724. Accessed 2 March 2026.

4. “More Books are Being Published by Women Authors Than Men”. World Economic Forum. 13 March 2023. Accessed 2 March 2026.

5. Ferguson, Donna (26 January 2019). “‘Keats is dead...’: How young women are changing the rules of poetry”. The Guardian. ISSN 1756-3224. Accessed 2 March 2026.

6. Williams, Holly (4 July 2017). “The women poets taking over the world”. BBC. Accessed 2 March 2026.

7. Wade, Imogen; Sutton, Ellora (19 March 2026). “On Girlhood: from Hello Kitty to the Virgin Mary: A conversation between Ellora Sutton and Imogen Wade”. Poetry London. Accessed 6 April 2026.

8. The line just below the title—“anything or anyone/ that does not bring you alive// is too small for you”—comes from David Whyte’s poem “Sweet Darkness”, which was originally read in The On Being Project’s podcast episode “The Conversational Nature of Reality”/“Seeking Language Large Enough” (as presented on their website). Accessed 19 June 2026.

9. Boast, Rachael (2011). “Peace and Plenty”. Sidereal, p. 12. London: Picador / Pan Macmillan. ISBN: 978-0-330-51339-5.