What jumps into your mind when you think of the most famous poems ever written? Shakespearean love poems? Something longer ...

But now that my journalistic integrity is in tatters, I might as well mention my favourite debut of the year, Absence ...

This poem embodies that sort of intense, fleeting crush you get on someone that feels as though you know them from a past life. You know nothing about them, only what you imagine them to be like.

Among Rossetti’s best known poems is this short work about one of the plants most associated with the Christmas season. Our idea of what Santa Claus looks like comes from a variety of places ...

The first stanza, excerpted above, evokes vivid images of pumpkins, and the full poem further brings to life warm feelings about the seasonal must-have—and another favorite: pumpkin pie.

Each of them offers poetry as, if not a solution, then a kind of truth-telling companion, a mirror with a real person on both sides of it. ‘The Gone Thing’ by Monica McClure. (Winter Editions) Monica ...