No Place Like Home: Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series)

Definitions of what “home” means are divided: setting up a home, the people next door, homeless, and so on. Editor Jane Holloway has compiled an impressive and emotional collection in No Place Like Home that ranges from seventeenth century poets like Anne Bradstreet to more modern voices like Mary Oliver and Billy Collins.

What Everyman’s Library Collections do so well is offer a taste of poems on a single subject, and this book is no exception. If you like poetry but never know who to read or where to start, this anthology on Home can be an excellent primer. The groupings of poems are especially strong in their contrasts. In the “Homecomings” section, Wislawa Szymborska’s “Homecoming” poem appears just before Christina Rossetti’s “At Home”. Despite the hundred years and thousands of miles that separate these poets and their work, this pair works in communication with each other to develop the larger theme.

That is, ultimately, the genius of the collection. No matter how recent or old the poems themselves are their ability to evoke “home” and draw us in is timeless.