Summer is the season when fiery passion, the desire for new laughter, the thirst for freedom awaken.
When, after a long and stressful day, we feel the need to retreat into a safe and positive space, perhaps outdoors, under the moonlight and the bright stars, poetry comes to our aid. A precious ally, it makes us feel alive again, capable of dreaming despite everything, despite everyone.
If you have the habit of keeping a book of poetry at your side, you will already know how the act of opening, leafing through and reading verses has a therapeutic power, whether you read in order of appearance in the text or decide to open and read a composition at random.
In this article we suggest 5 emotional poetry collections that smell of summer, love and freedom.
5 poetry books to read in the summer
“May I Be Your Summer” by Emily Dickinson
Let’s start with a poetic collection that smells of summer right from the title.
Emily Dickinson is among the most famous and quoted voices in modern lyric poetry: in her verses the continuous oscillation between absolute ecstasy and immeasurable pain, between desire and deprivation, between waiting and abandonment moves the reader, who immediately identifies with the author’s personal experience.
This volume collects some of her most beautiful love poems: the intimate restlessness and often lacerating tension that are a salient feature of Dickinson’s biography emerge clearly in her work too, communicating an unmistakable intensity and expressiveness.
“The Song of Life” by Rabindranath Tagore
If this summer you want to hole up in nature and feel it being part of you, we can only recommend the verses of Tagore, an Indian mystical poet to get to know and reread every time the frenzy seems to take over us.
“The Song of Life” is an anthology that collects Tagore’s most significant verses composed on the themes dearest to him: life, death, God, pain, joy.
The poet above all celebrates love, with an entirely oriental sensitivity: a synthesis of lover and beloved, close to God or identifiable with God himself, a tormenting and at the same time vital feeling, which moves energies that affect the whole of reality and the cosmos. As WB Yeats wrote, Tagore, like Indian civilization, realized its fullness in discovering the soul and abandoning itself to its spontaneity.
“You are the grass and I am the earth” by Antonia Pozzi
Antonia Pozzi’s love poems are alive, burning with passion. An essential read if your summer is full of romance.
The poems of Antonia Pozzi (1902-1938) are the faithful mirror of a tormented existence that ended prematurely, tragically. They sing with uncommon delicacy the impossible love for Antonio Maria Cervi, her Greek and Latin teacher, the very painful separation imposed on her by her father, and finally the emptiness, the devouring sense of loneliness comforted only by nature and that “womb of mountains” which was Antonia’s dearest refuge.
This volume collects some of his most intense poems, appreciated by Eugenio Montale and admired by TS Eliot for their “musicality”, “purity” and “honesty of spirit”.
“Poems of Love and Life” by Pablo Neruda
Let’s continue with a good dose of romance with the next tip for your poetic summer.
An anthology that collects the best of Pablo Neruda’s production, from his youthful compositions to the great books of his maturity. In this choice, the classic themes of the poetry of the great Chilean singer are brought together, love, struggle, ideals, nature, memory, themes that the poet’s intense and vibrant words forcefully emerge from the pages, accompanying the reader along a path that will progressively bring him closer to his inner world.
A Neruda who knows how to give voice to the eternal, radical needs of the human heart, a rare gift that helped make him one of the most beloved and popular poets of the twentieth century.
“Squid bones” by Eugenio Montale
Finally, one of the poetic collections that most refers to summer in the setting and sounds: “Ossi di seppia”.
The themes addressed by Montale in “Ossi di seppia” are negatively reminiscent of those that prompted D’Annunzio to write “Alcyone”: the Ligurian territory, the sea, the flora and fauna, the passing of time, everything that D’Annunzio used to describe the beauty, strength and vital energy of the human being, is used by Montale to show the fragility, the transience of what concerns us. And it is precisely in “Ossi di seppia” that we encounter Montale’s “pain of living”, which is somewhat reminiscent of the melancholy that afflicts us in the hot hours of summer, when life seems to be suspended for infinite moments.
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