Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

Poetry continues to be an important force in the world in the twenty-first century, and is arguably reaching, and being enjoyed by, more than readers than ever earlier, as the rise of Instagram poesy and prominent YouTubers demonstrates.

But what are some of the best poems of the twenty-outset century – the best poems of the century so far, anyhow – which the poetry novice should read to get a sense of how poetry is being kept alive, and adult, in the nowadays century?

Beneath, we introduce ten nifty xx-get-go-century poems from a range of contemporary poets.

ane. Michael Donaghy, 'Blackness Ice and Pelting'.

Published in 2000 in his collection Conjure, this verse form is the earliest on this list, appearing at the very starting time of the current century. Donaghy's early expiry, anile simply 50, in 2004 robbed the poetry world of more of his poetry, but 'Black Ice and Rain' stands as one of the greatest dramatic monologues, spoken by a man at a party who tells a stranger his sorry tale.

This poem takes in everything from religious conventionalities to personal tragedy, treating them with postmodern irony and using a car crash acquired by 'black ice and rain' as the focus.

2. Imtiaz Dharker, 'A Century Later'.

Dharker was built-in in 1954; 'A Century Later' was published in 2014 in Dharker'south collection, Over the Moon. Dharker was born in Lahore, Islamic republic of pakistan and grew up in Scotland. Equally well as existence a poet, she's a documentary filmmaker concerned with social justice and political causes.

In its harrowing description of a immature schoolgirl finding herself in the firing-line just for going to schoolhouse, which recalls Malala's remarkable journey, 'A Century After' reminds us that many parts of the world are still ravaged by war, and women – and young girls trying to go an pedagogy – detect themselves caught up in this nightmare earth.

3. Simon Armitage, 'The Shout'.

This verse form from 2002 by the current Poet Laureate of the Britain takes a memory from the poet's schooldays and so turns on a tragedy or incident which brings the earlier memory into clearer focus. Hither, the speaker of the verse form is remembering a schoolhouse practise that involved him and another boy who had to walk farther away and keep shouting, until he was out of earshot.

Twenty years on, and in Commonwealth of australia – just nigh equally far abroad as information technology'due south possible to become from Yorkshire where Armitage grew up – the poem takes a surprise, tragic turn …

4. Carol Ann Duffy, 'Text'.

This poem treats that nearly twenty-first-century of activities: text-messaging. Aptly, the verse form is brusk and telegrammatic, like a text message, presented in short, clipped couplets.

It's too a touching poem, marked past that repose desperation of something lost or unattainable, a quality which characterises much of Duffy's greatest work. First published in Rapture (2005).

Nosotros have analysed this poem hither.

5. Don Paterson, 'Rain'.

Published in the New Yorker in 2008 and written past one of United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland's leading contemporary poets, this poem is a meditation on the various uses of rain in films, written in rhyming (and one-half-rhyming) tetrameters. Paterson has expressed the opinion that the more than complex an thought or emotion is, the more onus there is on the poet to limited themselves clearly.

'Rain' is a fine instance of such an attitude to the poet's craft and responsibility: describing his ain fondness for films that 'beginning with pelting' or open with shots of a 'downpour', Paterson goes on to say that even the worst or overly long film tin 'do no incorrect' in his eyes, if it opens with rain on a 'starlit gutter'. The triplet with which the poem concludes is beautifully effective.

half dozen. A. E. Stallings, 'The Dollhouse'.

Stallings (b. 1968) is an American poet who, in 'The Dollhouse', offers a contemporary example of a poem using heroic couplets (rhyming couplets comprising iambic pentameter). Stallings' is a meditative lyric in which the speaker reminisces nigh the old dollhouse she and her sis played with every bit a child, and which, a generation earlier, her mother and aunt had played with as children.

7. Alice Oswald, 'Dunt: A Verse form for a Stale-Upward River'.

This 2016 poem by one of U.k.'due south greatest living poets (Oswald was born in Reading in 1966) is about a Gloucestershire river that has stale to a distill, where information technology was once a freely flowing river. The poem is as much well-nigh poetic cosmos – the need for a poet to make their words 'flow' – as it is about the river itself, and displays Oswald's technical mastery of form.

8. Heather McHugh, 'Webcam the World'.

Every bit the verse form'due south title makes clear, this is a contemporary poem about recording the world by videoing it on a computer. The poet calls upon humankind to capture and document everything before information technology all disappears for adept – it'south a poem about climate change and the idea of the 'concluding chance' to run across certain species and societies ('the boy in Addis Ababa who feeds / the starving dog' calling to mind the much-documented famines of Federal democratic republic of ethiopia).

Everything is fascinating – nothing fails to astonish the speaker, whether cute or ugly. There is even something elegiac about it, even though McHugh'southward verse form is not a formal elegy.

ix. Ian Hamilton, 'Prayer'.

The British poet, critic, and editor Ian Hamilton (1938-2001) was not a prolific poet: he published only a handful of collections in his lifetime:The Visit(1970), the collection of Fifty Poems (1988) and Sixty Poems (1998; building on the earlier fifty).

This is the shortest poem on this list, and maybe the most understated; it may too exist the virtually poignant. Written when Hamilton was dying of cancer in 2001, information technology shows the recovery, if not of the poet, of his determination to run across some other solar day.

x. Warsan Shire, 'Dwelling'.

The contemporary British poet Warsan Shire is the youngest poet on this listing: she was born in Kenya, to Somali parents, in 1988. In 'Home', Shire writes an impassioned poem virtually the reasons why refugees are forced to leave their homes in search of new ones: as the opening lines have it, nobody leaves dwelling house unless 'home' is the oral fissure of a shark.

Who accept nosotros missed off? Exercise experience gratuitous to leave your suggestions for other great contemporary poems and poets below. This list is just to get the suggestions off to a start…

The writer of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough Academy. He is the author of, among others,The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History  andThe Dandy War, The Waste matter Land and the Modernist Long Verse form.