5 top poetry picks for LGBTQI+ History Month

And to mark the occasion, the National Poetry Library has gathered together a celebration of LGBTQI+ poetry in their eloan collection.

This celebratory group includes poets of the past such as Sappho, Walt Whitman and Cavafy, whose poems are as essential and vivid as the most recent debuts in the collection by exciting new talents such as Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan and Phoebe Stuckes. In 2021, when the theme of LGBTQI+ History Month was ‘Body, Mind, Spirit’, our National Poetry Librarians picked out the following five works from their collection, which they felt captured these elements.

From the brilliant title of this book, and the fantastic first line (‘Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango’), Chinese-American poet Chen Chen will charm you with his spirited take on coming of age and coming out under the weight of his immigrant parents’ expectations; ‘My parents said: Doctor, / married to lawyer. The faucet said: Drip, drop, / your life sucks’.

These poems are a winning combination of humour and curiosity, self-obsession and political consciousness, with an eye for detail that makes the mundane wondrous in the vein of Frank O’Hara.

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Audio publisher W. F. Howes has been recording recent Faber poets reading their collections in their entirety and we’ve just added Mary Jean Chan, reading her 2019 Costa Poetry Award winning debut, to our holdings. Hearing a poet read their work can give a wonderful insight into how poetry begins in – and is communicated through – the body. We highly recommend reading a collection and listening to the poet read it at the same time.

Tough but vulnerable sums up these poems, and Chan’s reading voice. Chan fenced internationally for Hong Kong, and Flèche, pronounced ‘flesh’, is an offensive technique in the sport. This is a poet of precision and grace, grappling with others’ unacceptance of her body and sexuality.

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For over 50 years Marilyn Hacker has made verse forms traditionally associated with canonical male authors her own. This collection is no exception, including many ghazals, sonnets, a corona, a pantoum and a canzone. But though her technique is formal her language is direct and passionate, a poet of both the mind and the heart, of love and of war.

Born in America, Hacker has lived between New York and Paris for much of her life, becoming a renowned translator of French and Arabic poetry, giving voice to the Arabic-speaking immigrants and refugees of her second home. Though she writes from the perspective of a feminist, lesbian and Cancer-survivor, she has an international outlook and engagement. As she writes in the poem ‘Calligraphies I’, ‘Younger, we hoped for / long conversations with wine / multiple passports.’

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Prolific from the 1950s, Edwin Morgan came out when he was 70 and his poems have been an influence on subsequent generations of LGBT+ poets. His early poems are full of gay encounters, such as the sultry call to arms of ‘Glasgow Green’, which describes the gay cruising which was forced to go underground in city parks: ‘And how shall these men live? / Providence, watch them go! / Watch them love, and watch them die!’

Morgan is a poet of contrasts and extremes, and in poems such as ‘Strawberries’ and ‘One Cigarette’ we are gifted to lyric brilliance, inviting us to share intimate moments between lovers. If you are new to poetry, or recently rediscovering the artform, we recommended this book as the perfect place to start your journey. 

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Andrew McMillan’s debut collection was something of a literary sensation when first published in 2015; shortlisted for pretty much every poetry prize going it also became the first poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book of the Year Award. 

Described as ‘hymns to the male body’, McMillan’s poems get to the heart of the matter with their colloquial language and absence of punctuation. The I of the self is often the only capital letter on the book’s pages as the speaker of these poems navigates masculinity and physical love, and as a reader you’re right there with him.

Read a sample, or order the book

Beyond these five selections there are a huge number of other anthologies, titles and pamphlets in the National Poetry Library. Take a look at the full collection the library has pulled together in celebration of LGBTQI+ History Month on the website.

The National Poetry Library’s eloan collection consists of ebooks and audio freely accessible to anyone resident in the UK.

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