Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
Events
January 5 – The Turkish government announces it will posthumously restore the citizenship it had stripped from influential poet Nâzım Hikmet, a Marxist who died in 1963 as an exile in the Soviet Union. January 20 – Poet Elizabeth Alexander reads "Praise Song for the Day" at presidential inauguration of President Barack Obama. February 9 – Eritrean poet and broadcaster Yirgalem Fisseha Mebrahtu is arbitrarily arrested and begins 6 years imprisonment without trial. March 16 – Nicholas Hughes, 47, the son of the poets Ted Hughes (British poet laureate 1984–98) and Sylvia Plath, who famously committed suicide in 1963 when her son was a year old, hangs himself in his home in Alaska. He had suffered from depression. May 1 – Carol Ann Duffy is appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, the first woman appointed to the position in its 341-year history, a position that has been held by, among others, John Dryden (whom Charles II named the first official poet laureate ), Tennyson, Wordsworth and Cecil Day-Lewis. Duffy is also the first Scot and the first openly gay occupant of the post. May 5 – Posthumous publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's narrative poem The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in alliterative verse based on the 13th century Poetic Edda and probably written in the 1930s. May 16 & May 25 – Ruth Padel becomes the first female ever elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford but resigns nine days later after she is alleged to have been involved in what some sources refer to as a smear campaign against Derek Walcott, her leading rival for the post. July 30 – Last Post, a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, is read on the BBC Radio 4 programme Today. Commissioned by the BBC to mark the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, two of the last three surviving British veterans of the World War I, it is read on the day of Allingham's funeral. September 18 – The film Bright Star, about John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, is released in the United States, and on November 6 in the United Kingdom. The film's title is a reference to a sonnet by Keats, "Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art", written at the time of the love affair. Jane Campion directed the movie. A Room and a Half, a Russian film directed by Andrey Khrzhanovsky and based on the life of Russian–American poet Joseph Brodsky, is released. It is distributed in the United States in 2010.
Works published in English
Listed by nation where the work was first published and again by the poet's native land, if different; substantially revised works listed separately:
Australia
Robert Adamson, The Best Australian Poems, Black Inc., , anthology including works by Ivy Alvarez, Judith Beveridge, Sarah K. Bell, Jen Jewel Brown, Anne Elvey, Lisa Gorton, Clive James, Les Murray, Dorothy Porter, Peter Porter, Thomas Shapcott, Alex Skovron, John Tranter, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Stephen Edgar, Other Summers, 109 pp; Melbourne: Black Pepper, Jennifer Harrison and Kate Waterhouse, editors, Motherlode: Australian Women's Poetry 1986 – 2008, 120 poets represented, 342 pp, Glebe, New South Wales: Puncher and Wattmann, , anthology Emma Jones, The Striped World, winner of the 2009 Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award; Faber and Faber Martin Langford: editor, Harbour City Poems: Sydney in Verse 1788–2008, Glebe, New South Wales: Puncher and Wattmann, , anthology The Human Project: New and Selected Poems John Kinsella, The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry, Penguin Group (Australia) Les Murray, Killing the Black Dog, Black Inc., Dorothy Porter, The Bee Hut, Black Inc., Nathan Shepherdson, Apples With Human Skin, St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, Alan Wearne, guest editor, The Best Australian Poetry 2009, University of Queensland Press, Les Wicks The Ambrosiacs (Island Press (Australia)) editor, Guide to Sydney Beaches Meuse Press