Whether you’re new to poetry or you’re a lifelong appreciator of the form, it’s worth reading the best of the best. Here are some highlights from the past few years—poems to savor this summer, whether on the beach at night alone, or sitting on some bank beside a river clear.

1) Ruth Stone’s What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems: What Love Comes To was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, but to my mind is the best book of poetry published in 2008. Stone’s poems are concise and approachable, yet her imagery and figurative language are nearly always oddly arresting. Consider these four similes describing poetry: “Like comb jelly/like canned condensed air/like the full sac of the cobra/the bitter milk of the tongue.”

EENY, meeny, miny mo; put the baby on the po… I apologise for this lurch into poetry, but I have been sorely provoked by the new Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, whose first effort since her appointment is called Politics and starts like this: “How it makes of your face a stone that aches to weep, of your heart a fist, clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue an iron latch with no door.”

It’s pretty feeble, but not as sinister as one she wrote earlier: “Today I am going to kill something; anything; I have had enough of being ignored; I’m going to play God.”

I don’t so much object to these lines because they might encourage readers to commit murder, but purely on the grounds that they do not make a poem, or even a part of a poem. There is too much sloppy talk about poetry. Actually, few people can write poems.

No one should write poetry for money. No one can expect to make any money either. Even a Poet Laureate, or whoever gets to occupy the professor’s chair just vacated by Ruth Padel, will need other jobs, and other income, to make ends meet.

Poets make money out of patronage and from winning prizes. They grab fame, and fortune, thanks to our prurient fascination with their personal lives. Plays do quite well for them as well. But poetry itself? Not so much. And hardly ever for poems that win lasting, high, artistic acclaim.

Tennyson and Kipling, alongside other Victorians and Georgians from the golden age of poetic popularity, sold enough to keep the wolf from the door. So did James Riley, the Indiana-born bard who died, far from the first war trenches that inspired many poorer but better-remembered contemporaries, of a stroke in 1916. Martin Tupper was a popular Victorian poet who coined decent sums from his now-forgotten Proverbial Philosophies. But better financial rewards came with the cousin who gave his same name to Tupperware.