Who says poetry doesn’t sell?

It was fascinating to read how the book topping the poetry charts this year, Donna Ashworth’s To the Women, has shifted nearly 60,000 copies in 2025.

And no, before you wonder, the comma is not in the wrong place in that figure. It has sold nearly 60,000 copies. It’s one of six titles in the Top 50 from the poet who describes her work as a “survival technique turned into a passionate purpose”.

Now a Sunday Times bestseller, she shot to prominence with verse penned in the Covid-19 pandemic, including History Will Remember When the World Stopped which was shared around the world and performed by celebrities including Michael Sheen. To the Women (Black and White Publishing) is billed as “a celebration of the beauty, strength and joy of being a woman”.

Ashworth is a passionate advocate for bringing new readers to the genre and encouraging those who have been turned off it to return. “Our experience with poetry in childhood decides whether we seek it out as adults or not,” she tells me. “If we are led to believe it’s not for us – that can tend to stick. I hoped to call back some of those people and remind them that poetry need not be only for the few.

“I didn’t set out to create a brand, but I definitely hoped for a community," she adds. “Poetry is so deeply personal, it cuts through small-talk, and I had a dream of a place where this was normal behaviour, every day. If you want something enough and your mission is authentic and has service in its bones – you truly can’t go wrong.”

Dwell by Simon Armitage (Faber) is in second place although, with about 12,000 copies sold, is well behind To the Women. The Odyssey by Homer (Penguin Classics) is in third place, with Let the Light Pour In by Lemn Sissay (Canongate) in fourth. I was also pleased to see Lobster and Virgin by Hollie McNish (both from Fleet), as well as Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things (Penguin), make the list.

Given we are in the depths of winter and I am feeling festive, perhaps I can quote one of Berry’s most famous lines: "Suppose we did our work / like the snow, quietly, quietly, / leaving nothing out."

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As well as being the period in which Ashworth came to prominence, the pandemic also led to Will Harris writing his first work of non-fiction, Need Is Need. 

Blending memoir, reportage and historical inquiry, it was acquired by Fitzcarraldo Edition’s Rachael Allen from David Evans at David Higham Associates, on behalf of Nicola Chang who was on parental leave.

Given that Harris is a terrific poet and Allen is one of the smartest editors in the business, Need Is Need is set to be a landmark book. It addresses the crisis in public care, told through a year the author spent working in London’s extra-sheltered housing facilities during the pandemic’s aftermath.

Given we are in the depths of winter and I am feeling festive, perhaps I can quote one of Berry’s most famous lines: "Suppose we did our work / like the snow, quietly, quietly, / leaving nothing out"

Fitzcarraldo, meanwhile, also published one of my favourite books of 2025, Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss.

It was called “an inspiration” in a piece in the Times headlined "American poets are taking over – but are they better?" I was once told that if a headline ends with a question mark, then the article explicitly will not answer the question it poses, although this piece mostly berated the current state of US poetry. It observed that US imports are dominating the British poetry scene, remarking how their “first-person fixation feels a lot like navel gazing”. Ouch.

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As a lifelong admirer of many American poets, I was sad to hear of the demise of The Best American Poetry series.

This is to be the final year this annual anthology is produced, having clocked up 38 volumes with poems from luminaries such as Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Anne Carson, Charles Simic and Maya Angelou.

Scribner says this swansong edition offers a “vibrant selection of contemporary voices and serves as a fitting tribute to a series that has shaped and celebrated American poetry for nearly four decades”.

Its farewell has not been universally mourned, however. In a piece on The Defector headlined "Good Riddance to The Best American Poetry" (note the lack of a question mark in that headline) it was dubbed “commercialised, romanticised and evacuated of political responsibility”.

The American poet AE Stallings had previously been more positive, commenting that the list of editors represented “a who’s-who of US poetry elites”. She did acknowledge that, as with any annual publication in which the volume editor changes each year, it is “inevitably uneven”, but she believed the guiding hand of its founding editor, David Lehman, ensured a “certain base-level of quality”.

“Every year will have its new-discovered gems, its duds, its stars, and, often enough, its brief but vitriolic controversies played out across social media,” added Stallings.

Across the UK poetry sector, too, no doubt 2026 will have its gems, duds, stars and social media controversies.