Poetry book series in reading order

Charles Bukowski

75 books• 1 series

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) was a German-American poet, novelist and short story writer whose work sits among the poor of Los Angeles. Alcohol, low-wage work, women and the act of writing are the recurring subjects. Bukowski also wrote the column Notes of a Dirty Old Man for the underground paper Open City. The catalogue holds 75 titles dated 1962 to 2019, from the poetry collection Run With the Hunted to later gatherings such as On Drinking. Poetry accounts for most of it, with the novel Post Office arriving in 1971.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was an American poet whose subject was the natural world. The Pulitzer Prize came to Oliver in 1984, and the National Book Award followed in 1992. The catalogue holds 37 titles dated 1972 to 2026, from The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems to Goldfinches, taking in American Primitive (1983), Dream Work (1986), House of Light (1990) and A Poetry Handbook (1994). The volumes are short, around 80 pages at the median, and essay collections sit beside the poetry.

Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934 - August 31, 2026) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, farmer, environmental activist and cultural critic closely tied to rural Kentucky. Berry set out agrarian themes in The Unsettling of America (1977) and The Gift of Good Land (1981). The Port William novels and stories, including A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow and That Distant Land, examine rural community life. Berry received the National Humanities Medal, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture and belonged to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The catalogue lists 104 books from Nathan Coulter (1960) to Marce Catlett (2025).

Robert Frost

32 books• 4 series

Robert Frost (1874–1963) was an American poet known for realistic pictures of rural New England life and for a command of American colloquial speech, both used to open out social and philosophical questions. Frost is the only poet to have received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1958, took the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 and was named poet laureate of Vermont in 1961. Thirty books are catalogued, from A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) through Mountain Interval and The Road Not Taken (1916) to New Hampshire (1923) and the collected editions.

Maya Angelou

51 books• 3 series

Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014), born Marguerite Annie Johnson, was an American memoirist, poet, essayist and civil rights activist. Angelou published seven autobiographies, three books of essays and several books of poetry. The first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), covers Angelou's life up to age 17. Other catalogued titles include Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981) and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). The catalogue counts 51 books, including And Still I Rise (1978), and ends with Strategies of Abundance (2014). Angelou received more than 50 honorary degrees.

Margaret Atwood

89 books• 8 series

Margaret Atwood, born November 18, 1939, is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic and inventor. The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel from 1985, is the best-known Atwood work. Atwood's output includes 18 poetry books, 18 novels, 11 non-fiction books, nine short fiction collections, eight children's books and two graphic novels. The catalogue opens with The Circle Game (1964) and runs to Book of Lives (2025), with The Edible Woman (1969) and Surfacing (1972) along the way. Series include MaddAddam, Handmaid's Tale and Angel Catbird. Awards include two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and the Order of Canada.

Alice Walker

50 books• 1 series

Alice Walker is an American novelist, poet, short story writer and social activist. Walker's 50 catalogued books run from The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) to Sweet People Are Everywhere (2021). The Color Purple (1982) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Walker the first African-American woman to take that award, and it heads a Color Purple sequence. Poetry such as Revolutionary Petunias (1973) and essays such as In Search of Our Mother's Garden (1983) sit beside the novels. African American women authors, biography and poetry recur as subject headings. No new title has appeared since 2021.

Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 - November 13, 1952) was an American writer of children's books, among them The Runaway Bunny (1942) and Goodnight Moon (1947), both with illustrations by Clement Hurd. Brown has been called the laureate of the nursery. Brown also published as Golden MacDonald for Doubleday, as Timothy Hay for Harper & Brothers, and, with Edith Thacher Hurd, as Juniper Sage for William R. Scott. The catalogue lists 166 books, opening with When the Wind Blew (1937), then I Like Bugs and The Steam Roller (1938). Stories in rhyme, rabbits, bedtime and sound recur in the subjects.

Jack Kerouac

47 books

Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet, and a pioneer of the Beat Generation alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The catalogue carries 47 books dated 1942 to 2018, a span that runs long past Kerouac's death in 1969 through posthumous publication. The Sea Is My Brother (1942) and And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (1945) sit at one end, On the Road (1957) and The Dharma Bums (1958) in the middle, and Piers of the Homeless Night (2018) at the other. Poetry, letters and biography fill out the list beside the fiction.

Jane Yolen

237 books• 22 series

Jane Yolen (Jane Hyatt Yolen, February 11, 1939 to June 11, 2026) was an American author of fantasy, science fiction and children's books. The Devil's Arithmetic, a Holocaust novella, is the best-known Yolen work, and Owl Moon and The Emperor and the Kite are among the others. The short works Sister Emily's Lightship and Lost Girls both won Nebula Awards. The catalogue counts 237 books from The Witch Who Wasn't (1964) to Daddy Plays a Mean Guitar (2026). Series include Commander Toad, How Do Dinosaurs...?, Pit Dragons, the Young Merlin Trilogy, Books of the Great Alta and Tartan Magic. Yolen worked as an editor, collaborated most often with Adam Stemple, and in 2012 became the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture.

John Updike

83 books• 8 series

John Updike, born March 18, 1932, was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet and critic of art and literature who died on January 27, 2009. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, one of only four writers to do so, and the output spans over twenty novels and more than twelve short-story collections, plus poetry, children's books and criticism of art and literature. The New Yorker printed hundreds of Updike stories, reviews and poems from 1954 on, and Updike wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. The catalogue lists 83 books from The Poorhouse Fair (1958) to Hoping for a Hoopoe (2020), including Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). Series include Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, Henry Bech, Maples Stories and Eastwick.

Sherman Alexie

26 books

Sherman Alexie is a Spokane novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter and filmmaker whose work draws on his life as an Indigenous American with ancestry in several tribes. Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and lives in Seattle, Washington. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) is his best known book: it took the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2007, and the Odyssey Award for best audiobook for young people in 2008, read by Alexie himself. Twenty-six titles are catalogued, from The Business of Fancydancing (1991) to You Don't Have to Say You Love Me (2017).

Daisy Goodwin

21 books• 6 series

Daisy Georgia Goodwin, born 19 December 1961, is an English screenwriter, TV producer and novelist who created Victoria for ITV and PBS, a show sold to 146 countries. Goodwin's four novels, My Last Duchess / The American Heiress, The Fortune Hunter, Victoria and Diva, were New York Times bestsellers translated into more than ten languages. Goodwin has also curated eight poetry anthologies. The catalogue opens with The Nation's Favourite Love Poems (1997) and 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life (1999), and Diva (2024) is the newest.

Joyce Carol Oates

180 books• 8 series

Joyce Carol Oates, born June 16, 1938, is an American writer of novels, short stories, poetry, plays and nonfiction. The catalogue holds 180 books, beginning with By the North Gate (1963) and reaching The Frenzy: Stories (2026). Oates took the National Book Award for the novel Them (1969), and later honours include two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal and the Jerusalem Prize in 2019. Black Water, What I Lived For, Blonde and the collection Lovely, Dark, Deep were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014.

Jim Harrison

46 books• 4 series

Jim Harrison (December 11, 1937 - March 26, 2016) was an American poet, novelist and essayist who published across poetry, fiction, nonfiction, children's literature and memoir. Harrison also wrote screenplays, book reviews, literary criticism and essays on food, travel and sport, and said poetry mattered most among the work. Harrison published 24 novellas. The catalogue holds 46 books from Plain Song (1965) to The Search for the Genuine: Nonfiction, 1970-2015 (2022), including Wolf (1971), Farmer (1976) and Legends of the Fall (1979). Dalva and Detective Sunderson are named series.

D.H. Lawrence

146 books• 3 series

David Herbert Lawrence, 11 September 1885 to 2 March 1930, was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, travel writer, literary critic and painter. Lawrence's modernist writing examines modernity, social alienation and industrialisation while arguing for sexuality, vitality and instinct. Four novels went through censorship trials over their treatment of sex and their explicit language: The Rainbow (1915), Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The catalogue lists 146 entries, among them The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser (1912) and the story collection The Prussian Officer (1914), and groups some of them under Sons and Lovers and the Brangwen Family.

Gervase Phinn

54 books• 12 series

Gervase Phinn is an English author and educator, born on 27 December 1946. Phinn took an Education degree at Leeds Trinity University in 1970, taught, became a schools inspector and later held a Visiting Professorship of Education at the University of Teesside. The published work spans five volumes of memoir, poetry collections and books on education, with a focus on children's literature and literacy. The catalogue lists 54 books from Stage Write (1988) to At the Captain's Table (2022), including The Other Side of the Dale (1998) and the Little Village School and Top of the Dale series.

Lawrence Durrell

45 books• 4 series

Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) was an expatriate British novelist, poet, dramatist and travel writer, born in India, schooled in England from the age of 11, and resident in Corfu from 1935 and in many countries after that. The Alexandria Quartet, published between 1957 and 1960, is his best known work; the Avignon Quintet, the Revolt of Aphrodite and the comic Antrobus stories follow. Durrell's travel books include Prospero's Cell (1945) and Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957). He was the elder brother of the naturalist Gerald Durrell.

Erica Jong

29 books• 1 series

Erica Jong is an American novelist, satirist and poet. Fear of Flying (1973) is the book that made the name: controversial for its treatment of female sexuality, prominent in the development of second-wave feminism, and past 37 million copies sold. Isadora Wing is the recurring character, with a series recorded under that name. Jong's 29 catalogued titles begin with the poetry collection Fruits and Vegetables (1971) and take in further verse, fiction and biography through to The World Began with Yes (2019).

J.R.R. Tolkien

61 books• 13 series

J.R.R. Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 3 January 1892 to 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist, author of The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954 to 1955). At the University of Oxford, Tolkien held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon and a Pembroke College fellowship from 1925 to 1945, then the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature until retiring in 1959. Tolkien belonged to the Inklings and was a close friend of C. S. Lewis. The catalogue lists 61 books from A Middle English Reader and Vocabulary (1921) to The Battle of Maldon (2023), including the History of Middle-Earth, poetry and children's titles.

Ursula K. Le Guin

121 books• 18 series

Ursula K. Le Guin (born Ursula Kroeber, 21 October 1929 to 22 January 2018) was an American writer of speculative fiction, including science fiction set in the Hainish universe and the Earthsea fantasy series. First published in 1959, Le Guin wrote for nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories alongside poetry, criticism, translations and children's books. Catalogued titles include April in Paris (1962), Rocannon's World (1966), A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). Le Guin series include Hainish Cycle, Catwings, Orsinia and Annals of the Western Shore.

Sophie Hannah

52 books• 9 series

Sophie Hannah writes crime fiction and poetry. The Zailer & Waterhouse mysteries carry the suspense line, and Hannah also writes new Hercule Poirot mysteries; the catalogue's early titles, from Carrot the Goldfish (1992) onward, include the poetry collections Hotels like Houses (1997) and Leaving and Leaving You (1999). Missing persons, private investigation and England recur as subjects. Fifty-two books are catalogued, and The Opposite of Murder is the most recent.

Edgar Allan Poe

98 books• 4 series

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, known above all for poems and short stories of mystery and the macabre. Poe stands among the central figures of American Romanticism and Gothic fiction, was one of the country's first successful short story writers, and is counted a pioneer of detective fiction who also helped shape science fiction. The catalogue holds 98 entries, from Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) to The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (2023), with C. Auguste Dupin as a named series.

G.K. Chesterton

114 books• 6 series

G.K. Chesterton (Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 29 May 1874 to 14 June 1936) was an English writer of Christian apologetics, noted for wit, paradox and a defence of tradition. Chesterton created the priest-detective Father Brown and wrote the apologetic works Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism. The catalogue lists 114 books, opening with The Defendant (1901) and Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Carlyle (1902), and including The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), Heretics (1905) and The Club of Queer Trades (1905). Biographers place Chesterton as a successor to Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman and John Ruskin.