Five Women Poets You Should Be Reading Right Now 

Clare Pollard who teaches our popular course Learning from Female Poets recommends her top five women poets you should be reading right now.

1. One contemporary woman poet.

I’m reading Diane Seuss’ Modern Poetry at the moment and absolutely loving it. It’s the sort of poetry that makes me jealous. I read a couple of poems, then find I’ve got this competitive itch to try and do something as good! She’s so musical, and so wise. You’ll be taken in by the sumptuous music of it and then she’ll drop in some absolute truth like ‘infinite vigilance is a kind of death’ (‘Little Song’). But also, there are some amazing living poets, so it seems unfair to choose only one: shout-outs for my icons Anne Carson, Kim Hyesoon, Sharon Olds, etc.  

2. One from the literary canon.  

We should definitely be reading more poetry in translation in the UK. A lot of canonical female poets didn’t write in English, from Sappho to Marina Tsvetaeva – some of the all-time greats. I’m going to pick Forugh Farrokhzad, the Iranian poet – I’m currently reading Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems translated by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. Farrokhzad was only 32 when she died in a car crash in 1967, but her work is as influential as someone like Sylvia Plath – these incredible feminist poems that still sound brand new. Poems about desire, motherhood, the body, but also about walls, cages and thresholds: women trapped in silence and the dark: ‘If you come to my house, O kind one, bring me a lamp / and a tiny opening through which / I might look at the crowd in the happy street (‘Gift’)

3. One whose work explores what the world is currently going through, whose work offers salve for the times.  

Marie Howe is another of our great living poets, and I find her poems profoundly moving. They deal with addiction, death, abuse, misogyny, but are always open to the wonder of the present – ‘Sometimes a joy pours through me so immense’, as she puts it in ‘Magdalene Afterwards’. I’m a bit suspicious of the idea of poetry as ‘salve’, but Howe’s poetry does remind me that despite the horror, to be alive, right now, is a great privilege. The line I mention is from a new and selected collection, published by Bloodaxe this year which I’d recommend: What the Earth Seemed to Say. 

4. One who is underappreciated.

Wanda Coleman is absolutely wonderful. If you’ve enjoyed Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin you should absolutely read her ‘American Sonnets’, which were Hayes’ model. Just so much fire and nerve and talent. Reading Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems, I just wish she’d had more recognition in her lifetime – there’s this very upsetting line in Coleman’s poem ‘Obituary’: ‘The unread poems of true poets / are sad. No one should love / so hard in vain and go unnoticed’. 

I’ve written a glosa for her in my collection Lives of the Female Poets, a really interesting form where you borrow a quatrain from another writer and then expand on it. Every poet stands on the shoulders of others – I’m interested in forms that make that explicit. 

5. One who is funny.  

I’m a very big Dorothy Parker fan. I want to be Dorothy Parker. Is she the coolest poet of all time? Maybe. That kind of dark, acid wit is very much my sense of humour. My next children’s book has this really cynical little girl in it who wears black and is sarcastic about everything, and she’s basically an 11-year-old Dorothy Parker. I love the Penguin Complete Poems, especially when Parker punctures male poets who take themselves too seriously, as in her poem ‘Alfred, Lord Tennyson’:  

Should Heaven send me any son,

I hope he’s not like Tennyson.

I’d rather have him play a fiddle

Than rise and bow and speak an idyll.

Clare Pollard has published five collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, most recently Incarnation. Her poem ‘Pollen’ was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2022. She has been involved in numerous translation projects – including translating Ovid’s Heroines, which she toured as a one-woman show – and was editor of Modern Poetry in Translation for five years. Her most recent books are the children’s novel The Untameables and the adult novel The Modern Fairies. She is currently artistic director of the Winchester Poetry Festival, and her next collection Lives of the Female Poets will be published by Bloodaxe in September 2025. 

Clare will be running her course Learning from the Female Poets: Influence & Inspiration again with us this Autumn, starting on 9 October 2025. This course is currently sold out, so if you would like to be added to the waiting list please email [email protected].

Image credit: @kazuend