Post by Mark T. Locker.

April is here! Spring is in the air and it’s time once again to celebrate National Poetry Month! It’s the one time each year that bookstores dust off their poetry collection and put their Tennyson and Dylan Thomas books out for display. I have a love/hate relationship with poetry. Bad poetry, in my opinion, is the most painful thing to read. But good poetry! O! Tis the sweetest nectar ever drunk! I read a lot of poetry to my son, from Shel Silverstein to Kenn Nesbitt & Jack Prelutsky. Jack Prelutsky is a bit tricky at times; he uses some pretty sophisticated language, which I think takes from my son’s appreciation of the poems.

I love poetry that rhymes. Children’s poems, grown-up poems, you name it. If it rhymes I am way more likely to enjoy it. From Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s eerily weird “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to Dylan Thomas’s beautiful “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” I love the cheerful lilt of the poems, especially when juxtaposed with a solemn subject (Poe, for example).

Here are a few of my favorite collections of poems, some for grown-ups, some for kids, some for everybody.