For his bookshop and website One Grand Books, the editor Aaron Hicklin asked people to name the 10 books they’d take with them if they were marooned on a desert island. The next in the series is the Garth Greenwell, author of “What Belongs to You.” He shares his list exclusively with T.

“Desire,” Frank Bidart

In my personal canon, Frank Bidart is the gold standard, the most important living American writer. His discomfiting poems delve into extremes of emotion that would defeat almost any other writer. Fearless, brilliant, they remind me what the stakes of art should be.

“Middle Earth,” Henri Cole

Henri Cole’s poems pair surfaces of classical, sometimes cool, elegance of expression with emotion of extraordinary heat. The startling, beguiling poems in this book are masterful and heartbreaking.

“The Angel of History,” Carolyn Forché

This ambitious, uncannily beautiful book moves me more deeply with every reading. A powerful meditation on history and conscience, it’s also an assertion of the centrality of political witness to the work of art.