Here’s my project. I read a poem a day, imbibe its rhythms and use this as an inspiration for my own writing. Because it’s 2016, I’ll choose 16 quotes from 16 of these poems to feature on A Bigger Brighter World so you’ll get to enjoy a taste of them too. I may not manage it every month. But, if I do, that will equal 16 poems a month for 12 months (meaning 192 poems by the end of the year). What an excellent feast of poetry to look forward to …

My first 16 poetry quotes for January are:

1.  ‘New Year’s Day’ by Michelle Dicinoski

I’m trying to write the you      (if only you saw) /so holy in the half-light      when I saw you / for the first time     and knew it was the last.

Michelle Dicinoski is an Australian author of the memoir Ghost Wife (Black Inc.), and the poetry collection Electricity for Beginners (Clouds of Magellan).

2. ‘New Year’s Day’ by Kim Addonizio

I walk across the fields with only / a few young cows for company. // Big-boned and shy, / they are like girls I remember // from junior high, who never / spoke, who kept their heads // lowered and their arms crossed against / their new breasts. Those girls / are nearly forty now.

Kim Addonizio is an American poet and novelist. She once told Contemporary Authors: ‘Writing is an ongoing fascination and challenge, as well as being the only form of spirituality I can consistently practice.’

3. ‘New Year’ by Kathleen Graber

 beginning. Nearly warm. And the vultures / untuck their heads, spread their wings & hold, hold, hold. Salutation:/

Kathleen Graber is the author of two poetry collections, including The Eternal City, finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry. She directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.

4. ‘This Being Still’ by Vona Groarke

I have brought her to an island / of cropped light and few words, / her silence just as diffuse as my own. // She keeps close into me.  // It is a small gift to the world, / I reckon, this our being still.

Vona Groarke is one of the leading Irish poets of her generation. Her sixth and latest collection of poems is X. She teaches at the University of Manchester and edits Poetry Ireland Review.

5. ‘An Adventure’ by Louise Glück

Here the vision ended. I was in bed, the morning sun / contentedly rising, the feather comforter / mounded in white drifts over my lower body. / You had been with me— / there was a dent in the second pillowcase. / We had escaped from death— / or was this the view from the precipice?

Louise Glück is considered by many to be one of America’s most talented contemporary poets. She teaches at Yale University and ‘An Adventure’ is published in her most recent poetry collection Faithful and Virtuous Night.

6. ‘Tjukurrpa’ (for Aunty Phyllis and Aunty Eileen RIP) by Ali Cobby Eckermann

my basket is heavy with history / out of sight like superstition // our footsteps in the sand / will turn to rock soon // my father is the sand dune / that rock is my mother

Ali Cobby Eckerman is an award-winning poet who comes from Yankunytjatjara culture and country. ‘Tjukurrpa’ is published in her most recent poetry collection Inside My Mother (Giramondo Publishing) in which she reflects on the effects of Australia’s history of the removal of Aboriginal people from family and tradition, her maternal heritage and her losses and loves.

7. ‘Abstract Alcohol’ by Michael Farrell

An old man enters wrapped in violet gas, / shooting sand from his eyes. The country / singer takes off his moss jacket, revealing / a bitumen vest and tattoos like giant staples down his biceps.

Michael Farrell has a reputation as the most adventurous and experimental of contemporary Australian poets. ‘Abstract Alcohol’ is published in his most recent collection Cocky’s Joy (Giramondo Publishing).

8. ‘Calyptorhynchus funereus (Yellow-Tailed Black Cockatoos)’ by Dimitra Harvey

Your plumes are as black as the dresses and jackets / we wear at the edges of burial plots. I’ve read stories / of the storms you portend; how you are a cipher

Dimitra Harvey has a Bachelor of Performance Studies from UWS and a Master of Letters in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Her poems have been published in Southerly, Meanjin and Mascara. In 2012, she won the Australian Society of Author’s Ray Koppe Young Writer’s Residency.

9. ‘We are Always Too Late’ by Eaven Boland

The re-enactment. Always that. / I am getting up, pushing away / coffee. Always I am going towards her. // The flush and scald is / to her forehead now, and back down to her neck. // I raise one hand. I am pointing to / those trees, I am showing her our need for these / beautiful upstagings of / what we suffer by / what survives. And she never even sees me.

Eaven Boland is one of the foremost writers in contemporary Ireland. Her poetry is known for subverting traditional constructions of womanhood, as well as offering fresh perspectives on Irish history and mythology. New Collected Poems, published in 2008, updates the record of her valuable and vibrant artistic output.

10. ‘Silva’ by Robert Adamson

Australia we sobbed through the paperbarks’ songs / to birds and gentle animals // and to the soft-stepping people of its river-banks

Robert Adamson is one of Australia’s most loved and awarded poets. He is currently the inaugural CAL chair of poetry at the University of Technology, Sydney. ‘Silva’ is published in Mulberry Leaves: New and Selected Poems 1970-2001 (Paper Bark Press).

11. ‘Old Light’ by Peter Waldor

one old light / took thirteen billion years / to pass the fence /of his eyelash

Peter Waldor is the author of four collections of poetry including The Unattended Harp (Settlement House) in which ‘Old Light’ appears. He is also the Poet Laureate of San Miguel County, Colorado and works in the insurance business.

12. ‘Now Winter Nights Enlarge’ by Thomas Campion

Now yellow waxen lights / Shall wait on honey love / While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sighs / Sleep’s leaden spells remove.

Thomas Campion (sometimes Campian / 1567 – 1620) was an English composer, poet, and physician. His importance for nondramatic literature of the English Renaissance lies in the exceptional intimacy of the musical-poetic connection in his work.

13. ‘A Testimony’ by Robert Gray

What is most needful is that we become modest. And the work of art that / can return us to our senses. / Our only paradise is the ordinary: to be fed by what is really here.

Robert Gray has published many collections and won numerous awards—including for his memoir, The Land I Came Through Last, which received the Copyright Agency Limited/Waverley Library prize.  ‘A Testimony’ is published in Cumulus (Collected Poems) (John Leonard Press).

14. (UNTITLED) by Catherine Barnett

C minus A and B equals— / Tree with no branch equals // What grief looks like: / A knife rusted in the side of / A goat // No, no / A coin falling in water / And the fish dart for it.

Catherine Barnett is the author of two collections of poetry: Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books) and The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press).  (UNTITLED), published in Into Perfect Spheres, explores the transit of grief a family endures due to the sudden deaths of the speaker’s two young nieces.

15. ‘Kingfisher’ by Neil Curry.

For once the shells split and sapphire / And fire-opal fledge in their filth / And six or seven small spurts of flame / Are tumbled out into the dazzle,

Neil Curry has published four collections of poetry and completed a full-length study of William Cowper. His verse translations of Euripides have been performed in many countries. His poems have appeared in many pamphlets and magazines, and have won several national prizes.

16. ‘I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense’ by Danez Smith

Have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California? / The sun above you, the snow & stalled sea—a field of mirror

Danez Smith is the winner of a 2014 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and is a Cave Canem, VONA, and McKnight Foundation Fellow. He is the author of [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), one of the Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2014.