1914 was a bad year for politics but a great year for poetry: you could argue that it was the year that Modernism hit its stride. 2014 was pretty great, too. These are the books that I predict will be read in 2114—on Mars, perhaps, by whatever creatures produced that recent puff of Martian methane, as a record of what earthly hearts contained.

**1. “Collected Poems,” by Mark Strand. **Strand, who died in November, never seemed convinced that he was alive in the first place. His poems are permanent; he was a ghost moving through them.

**2. “Citizen,” by Claudia Rankine. **Part documentary, part lyric procedural: a jarring and beautiful book of poems, images, and prose meditations about everyday racism.

3. “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” by Louise Glück. Two hundred and forty-six days of the year, Glück seems to me the greatest American poet of our era. The other days she’s tied with four or five others. “Faithful and Virtuous Night” is a strange book, pulling in signals from God knows where. A book of mysteries, gorgeous and fugitive.[#image: /photos/59096053c14b3c606c105be6]

**4. “The Lyrics,” by Bob Dylan. **This lavish book, brilliantly edited and introduced by Christopher Ricks, makes the case for Dylan the Poet. If you can find it (few copies were printed), afford it (they’re expensive, and the price has been jacked up on secondary markets), lift it (it weighs more than thirteen pounds, and nearly crushed my son’s foot when he dropped it), and banish the tunes from your head, you’ll see what Ricks sees.

**5. “The Pedestrians,” by Rachel Zucker. **A book about time, focussed on one of its most heartbreaking dilemmas: how to be in the moment when all you can think about is the nostalgia you’ll feel for it once it’s over. Poetry as a temporal acrobatics, outwitting distraction.

**6. “The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems,” by Olena Kalytiak Davis. **Davis lives in Anchorage, Alaska, where she writes these blunt, canny poems about presence, absence, sex, longing, and the long prom season of literary greatness. Dante and Robert Lowell are among the suitors vying for her hand.

**7. “Go Giants,” by Nick Laird **(published in 2013, but I read it late). Laird is an Irish poet now living in New York. The poems are barbed, boyish, learned, funny, and surprising; he is above the turf spats of American poetry, or seems so.

**8. “Corridor,” by Saskia Hamilton. **Poems as passionate in their austerity, and as austere in their passion, as Hopper or Hardy: the latter informs these poems of low-slung, mossy landscape.

**9. “Second Childhood,” by Fanny Howe. **Howe cannot be classified: her poems are lyrically alert, devout, joyous, quiet. She’s the Sufjan Stevens of American poets.

Year in review: New Yorker writers look back on 2014.