Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry

by William Sieghart (Editor)

Poems of the Decade brings together more than one hundred poems from the many thousands submitted to the Forward Prizes for Poetry in the first decade of the 21st century.

The Forwards are among the world's most coveted poetry honours. They have been awarded annually since 1992 for the Best Collection, Best First Collection and Best Single Poem published in Britain and Ireland, and the roster of winning, shortlisted and highly commended poets regularly juxtaposes familiar canonical names with fresh voices.

This anthology of anthologies draws on the ten Forward Books of Poetry published to accompany the prizes between 2001 and 2010. It is the perfect introduction to a wide range of contemporary poetry: works that speak of violence, danger and fear, of love and all that opposes love, in forms of language broken and reshaped by the need to communicate what it is to be alive now, here.

Agbabi, Armitage, Burnside, Duffy, Dunmore, Fanthorpe, Heaney, Motion, Nagra, O'Brien and more.

Genres: Poetry, School, Read For School, English Literature, College, Anthologies

208 pages, Paperback

First published October 8, 2001

Reviews

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to study this for English Literature A-Level, and at first I hated it. The contemporary nature of the majority of the poems was not appealing to me, bearing in mind I'm a huge fan of Emily Brontë's and Hardy's poetry - how do incontinent, blind aunties and chlamydia roulette compare to the stunning Wessex landscape?
But there are some gems in here, I promise. There's a wide range of voices and forms so there should be something for everybody. My favourites were : Roderick Ford's Giuseppe, Robert Minhinnick's The Fox in the National Museum of Wales, Ian Duhig's The Lammas Hireling and Patience Agbabi's Eat Me. (None of these came up in the exam, typical.)

[Fatima · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've got to say I really enjoyed some of the poems but disliked other poems. Some were really interesting while others were peculiar,weird and unlikable.

[Thomasbell6410 · Rating 3 out of 5]

was about £7.99 too expensive

[Mehet · Rating 3 out of 5]

i HATE ‘out of the bag’. There is no need for a 3 page poem, might as well just write a book at that point.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I'm reading this because I'm teaching it but I'm really glad I am. far superior to most odds and ends anthologies there are some real gems in here and a wide range of different styles.

[Charlotte Whiteing · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got an exam on this tomorrow, some of the poems are good but some are very bad

[Alyssa · Rating 5 out of 5]

why is there death in nearly all of these poems. i vote for more happy poetry.

[Robyn Langford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I studied these for a level english and some of them were awful to me but others like ‘Giuseppe’ absolutely hit me and gave me chills

[Todd Denning · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best poetry anthologies I’ve come across. Deeply vivid, often funny whilst comfortably confronting an immense variety of serious themes, this anthology does exactly as it says, it captures the best voices in poetry from the last decade. For those looking to ease themselves into poetry this would be a brilliant place to start.

[Josef Pevec-Loft · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A Minor Role" is one of my favourite poems of all time

[AJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

im literally frothing at the mouth to annotate this.

[ronushka · Rating 3 out of 5]

i had to study this for my a levels edexcel AS lit class and this definitely was something… there were so much confusing annoying poems also interesting cool ones!! im gonna rank all the poems i had to do bc my exams are in 3 days and its worth it.

interesting poems : eat me, chainsaw vs pampass grass, the deliverer, the map woman, the lammas hireling, the gun, the furthest distance ive travelled, giuseppe

alright, not bad : history, an easy passage, to my nine year old self, a minor role, effects, genetics, look we have coming to dover, on her blindness, ode on a grayson perry urn

i despise these : material, out of the bag, from the journal of a disappointed man, please hold,

out of every poem we did, the lammas hireling really caught my eye while out of the bag did the opposite. it was too lengthy, confusing and annoying idk.

[Megan ♡ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read 28 of these for college, so decided I may as well try and read the rest so I could add it to my Goodreads list. But the thing is, I really don't like poetry. I find it hard to get into, and most of the time, have no idea what imagery and symbolism the poets are trying to put across. Call me uncultured, or stupid, I just really don't enjoy poems. For me, I loved A Minor Role, Fantasia on a Theme of James Wrightand The Lammas Hireling because they actually meant something to me, and I found the actual content intriguing. I'm obsessed with myths and legends and magic because growing up my grandmother used to tell me stories similar to that of The Lammas Hireling (not even very censored versions). She would also tell stories of minors so James Wright was close to my heart. And for some reason, I felt as though A Minor Role was about depression, although none of my class (or my teacher) agreed with me. I don't know why, I just felt very attached to that one, and felt as though depression was exactly what Fanthorpe was trying to describe. Who knows... like I said - I'm not the best at understanding poetry.

[Dane Cobain · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think my rating for this book was affected by the fact that I’ve already read a bunch of these after winning them in a National Poetry Day competition. I was familiar with some of the poems because they’d appeared in the other collections and to be honest, by the time I got halfway through it I just wanted it to end.

That’s not to say that this isn’t a good collection. It’s just that it’s deceptive and turns out to be a lot longer than it looks. I think it was the right book at the wrong time for me, and there was too much poetry that required you to think about it and not enough of it that just held a mirror up to the world. Don’t get me wrong, a decent mix is nice, but this probably isn’t the book to give you that.

Still, if you like modern poetry then it’s not a bad little collection. Plus it includes plenty of award winners if that’s your sort of thing.

[Chloe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not a huge fan of poetry, but I needed to read some of these for college. In the end, I decided to read all of them so I could add the book to my yearly total.

I rated all the poems based on how I felt about them, the average of this coming to 1.7, giving it an overall rating of 2 stars. Most of my ratings came from my general comprehension of the poem itself, some of which were more difficult to understand than others. After reading this, it is safe to say that poetry is still not something I particularly enjoy but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.

Rating - 2/5
★★

There is a full list of poems with my ratings next to them on my blog here!

[Klinta · Rating 1 out of 5]

One star, because I only liked a handful of poems.
That means that either most of those celebrated and published poems are pretty bad or the person who compiled this wasn't on top of his game.

It's ridiculous how shallow and stupid some of those works were. It is even more ridiculous how deep and stupid some of those works were. I'm glad for the ones I liked, but mostly it was crap. Sorry, not sorry.

[Via ⚡️ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, most of these poems are rubbish. Far too contemporary that they lose meaning, or just plain weird and unrelatable.

But there a some - just a handful, mind you - of gems:
The Lammas Hireling
Eat Me
A Minor Role
The New Bride (we don't study this one, but it's stunning)
The Furthest Distances I've Travelled

[Michael Spendelow · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exceptionally intriguing collection of modern poetry that draws focus on modern as well as long-standing thematic links and collated in a most impressive fashion.

Stand out poems for me: Robert Minhinnick's 'The Fox in the National Museum of Wales' and Saumas Heaney's 'Out of the Bag'.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a bit disappointed by this. Most of the poems I didn't like much, there were some that I enjoyed but none that I loved.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Studying some these poems in English Literature but I have also taken the time to read the others in this anthology. One of my favourites would have to be Out of Control.

[Elancharan Gunasekaran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely selection, the longer form poems are a chore to read, love the shorter forms.

[no-one you know · Rating 2 out of 5]

some triumphs.
some... eh.
xonoone

[chad chrysanthemum · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are, by my count, 106 poems in this book. That's a lot of poems, and so it doesn't really surprise me that a fair portion of them are boring, or overly contrived, or twee, or trite. Some of these poems I finished and actually scoffed at, aloud. But, equally, this was genuinely one of the most compelling books I've read recently. I found myself picking up the collection, again and again, telling myself "just one more", hoping that the next one would be the best so far, another fleck of gold panned out of the dirt. I think too many of the poems wax poetic (!) about the countryside or whatever, but some are just brilliant: the sort of poem where you finish and feel a little shiver go down your spine. A fun thing about it being an anthology is that every poem is by a different author, so you get a thousand (well, a hundred) different styles of poetry. That being said, I almost don't think it's fair to review these poems all as a whole, so let me just talk about some of my favourites (I'll put them under a spoiler thing because I have a lot to say)

Being Boring - Such a beautiful poem about the joy of a boring, contented life. Even more powerful now, in times that are anything but boring. Plus, it rhymes and I think rhyming poems are totally underrated nowadays.
The Map Woman - I love all of Duffy's poetry, so it's no surprise that I was a fan of this one. It's really long, and tells this winding story of a woman's connection to her home-town. The last stanza may have made me cry.
The Gun - God this is a clever and powerful and brilliant poem. It's sparse but straight to the point, imagery just enough to paint the whole gory picture. So, so, brilliant.
Effects - A lot of these poems are odes to dead parents, and this is one of the best. I think it captures well his mother's life, as well as his experience of her decline and death. I liked how the title only made sense to me when I read the last line.
Mother Tongue - Hilarious! A joyful and weird comparison of literature to drugs.
Thursday - This is almost an anti-poem, and I love the way it questions the idea of what poetry even is. Good stuff.
Along the Coast - Oh my God I could see every single image that Moffat used laid out right in front of me. The repetition plays into the tale of lost youth, declining life, meaningless days and dreary nights (at the beach!)
Genetics - I liked this as a look at what our parents bequeath to us - the way the narrator looks at her hands, sees her parents held there, and runs with that idea is just brilliant.
Please Hold - Weirdly sinister in the repetition of "this is the future" that travels through this story of one man's struggle with a telephone call to the telephone company. It's excellent to read out loud, and you can feel a sympathetic anger build in you as you read it.
Spiders - I liked this one mostly because it's very relatable to me right now (I'm at the receiving end of a spider-based curse). "Rorschach inkblot" is the perfect way to describe those bastards that keep showing up in my house.
Song for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze - This might be my favourite in the collection. It's an insane concept for a poem - an ode to a Georgian EDM music producer. And it's an insane poem too - loaded with EDM jargon, extremely long and complicated lines, a classic AABB rhyme scheme - it shouldn't work, but I think it absolutely does. It's very, very funny, and it's brilliant to read aloud, to hear the weird and wonderful sounds of words that mean nothing to you (but mean a lot to someone else) dance in the air.
Thinking of England - A really nuanced look at national identity and pride. The structure makes it look pretentious as all hell (I hate any poem divided into sections, especially if they use roman numerals), but it's so, so good. Pollard explores how despite the horrors wrought by our ancestors, we can still feel a pride in being English.

[Lizixer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I note from the reviews that many people had to study this anthology for A level leaving some of them with a certain amount of antipathy for it (often acknowledging the three or four poems they did like).

I have some sympathy for them as it can be very deadening to your enjoyment of a poem knowing that you’ve got to write 2,000 words on it by Friday (although sometimes a guided deep dive into a difficult poem can also reveal its strengths).

Fortunately, my days of 2,000 word English Literature essays is far behind me and I can simply read these poems for pleasure.

One reviewer commented why are so many of these poems about death (I could almost see the shudder as they wrote). I think they are close but then look away.

Poetry is about distilling down to a bright nugget of language the deepest, most universal truths about human lives; birth, love, pain, grief and, yes, death. It invites you in on at a moment, a feeling, an event and asks you to share it. It knows perhaps, that even though that moment or feeling is yet to be experienced by you, one day you’ll find yourself there but you are ready for it because the poet has already helped you to live it once.

When you are a teenager, there are things you passionately want to experience but grief, ageing and death are not usually amongst them. One day, though, a poem that you know so thoroughly because you spent the hours on it will come back to you to tell you that you’re not alone and that this too shall pass.

Some of these poems spoke directly to my experience, others I’ll squirrel away for the days when such things might happen. Some simply entertained me, others left me scratching (metaphorically) my head. And that’s okay. The nature of an anthology means not every poem or poet speaks equally powerfully to you. I recommend looking up the bios of the poet to find out where they are from and how old they are, sometimes this is can help locate the poem in space and even time. Some of these poems deserve to be read aloud. I’ll leave you to decide which ones.

[Mengzhen Markland · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was honestly the first proper poetry collection I've read in a long time and it was definitely a great way for me to dive back into the modern genre. I wouldn't recommend trying to read it quickly, and I think I definitely enjoyed it more BECAUSE I took almost 5 months to read it. There was a huge variety of different voices and writing styles which I liked and had a good time reading it, even if some poems weren't as enjoyable as the others.

Here's a list of my fave poems from this collection:
Eat Me by Patience Agababi, Monogamy by Kate Bingham, Inheritance by Eavan Boland, A Leisure Centre Is Also a Temple of Learning by Sue Boyle, Manifesto by Allan Crosbie, The Year's Afternoon by Douglas Dunn, Giusuppe by Roderick Ford, Cooking With Blood by Linda France, XVII Correspondences: Aphorisms Regarding Impatience by Ellen Hinsey, The Ayrshire Orpheus by Mick Imlah, Mother Tongue by Gwyneth Lewis, She Is in the Past, She Has this Grace by Medbh McGuckian, A History of Doing Nothing Patrick McGuinness, Please Hold by Ciaran O'Briscoll, Thinking of England by Clare Pollard, The New Bride by Catherine Smith

[Iulia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn’t my first rodeo with the Forward anthologies so I knew what I was in for, and it was no more and no less what I expected: an absolute mixed bag.

Some poems - few - were amazing and delivered that jolt that I’m always, relentlessly, looking for in poetry:

“Eat Me” - Patience Agbabi
“Burying the Ancestors” - Judi Benson
“A Leisure Centre Is Also a Temple of Learning” - Sue Boyle
“One, Two” - Kate Clanchy
“The Lammas Hireling” - Ian Duhih
“The Passion” - Helen Oswald
“Genetics” - Sinéad Morrisey

Most were just OK, competent enough but leaving me cold, or maybe trying very hard but delivering little for all that. Some of them were dull, some pretentious, some I found unreadable (like Don Paterson’s). There was also a huge amount of self-mythologizing in many of these poems that, page after page after page, became irritating AF. Poets: no one cares about your mam & dad as much as you think they do. Cut it off now.

[Ben Molina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely adore this collection, I disregard anyone's opinions on it. This is a perfect example of how good modern poetry can be, forget the rupi Kaur dribble. Studying this for A level has been such an incredibly pleasurable and warm experience, with poems as beautiful as The Lammas Hireling, as heartfelt as on her blindness and effects and even ones as Tactile and pronounced as The Gun or here we have coming to Dover. Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn is a masterful poem. And yes there may be some that are slogs (cough cough, please hold), they all deliver lavish discoveries. I am proud to say I'm picking up a copy of my own to use.

[Reneé Lane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I studied this for A-Level English Literature and overall most of the poems were good, and some I still remember well.

The poems I studied:
Eat Me ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Chainsaw Versus the Pampus Grass ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Material ⭐️⭐️
History ⭐️⭐️⭐️
An Easy Passage ⭐️⭐️
The Deliverer ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Lammas Hireling ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
To My Nine-Year-Old-Self ⭐️⭐️⭐️
A Minor Role ⭐️⭐️
The Gun ⭐️⭐️
The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Giuseppe ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Out of the Bag ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Effects ⭐️⭐️
Genetics ⭐️⭐️⭐️
From the Journal of a Disappointed Man ⭐️⭐️
Look We Have Coming to Dover ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Please Hold ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
On Her Blindness ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn ⭐️⭐️⭐️