Mary Oliver to Conchitina Cruz: 7 female poets for your reading list during International Women’s Month

In a world that prioritises efficiency and ambition, Mary Oliver’s words are a breath of fresh air. After a childhood spent traipsing the woods of Cleveland, Ohio, she settled in Cape Cod with her long-time partner Molly Malone Cook. Her poetry is beloved for balancing a sense of wonder with sharp, weighted precision. 

One of her most famous poems is Wild Geese, a poem in which she deconstructs deep feelings of shame and despair. “You do not have to be good,” she writes. “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” 

Merlie Alunan is a poet, teacher and mentor who started writing poetry in midlife. After turning forty, she dreamt of a monkey child who followed her around. Her mentor, another writer named Edith L Tiempo, told her it was her creative life. “It is just misshapen for you have not embraced it,” she remarked. 

After her marriage ended, she left her home in Cebu City to begin a writing career in Tacloban. “Without a household to care for, without the children to demand my attention, I had too much time on my hands, too easy to go mad,” she wrote. “The words named my monsters–anger, loneliness, fear. Once named, they lost their power.” 

Alunan joined the Silliman National Writers’ Workshop before hosting a creative writing workshop at the University of the Philippines Tacloban College (UPVTC). Since then, she has received prizes from the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and National Book Awards for her poetry and translations.

Born into a family of artists and teachers, Limón spent her high school years immersed in theatre productions. It was around this time that she fell in love with poetry. Instead of pursuing this path full-time, she focused on her marketing career. After her stepmother passed away from colon cancer, Limón realised she wanted to pursue writing full-time. 

In her poetry collections like Bright Dead Things (2015) and The Carrying (2018), she establishes her voice as both authentic and authoritative. Through these collections, she processes her struggles with infertility and caring for aged parents. 

She also gives readers a breathtaking glimpse into her romantic relationships. In What I Didn’t Know Before, she writes: “What was between us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.” 

Known as one of the earliest Filipina feminist poets, Marjorie Evasco has established herself as a force to be reckoned with. Born into a family of teachers “who were always talking English,” she spent her formative years in a Catholic institution before studying at Silliman University and De La Salle University Manila. 

She writes in both English and Binisaya (Boholano-Visayan), with her work being translated into languages like Korean. In 2010, she received the Southeast Asian Writers’ Award by then Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, who is now the King of Thailand. Among her numerous prizes, she has received the Philippine National Commission on Culture and the Arts “Ani ng Dangal” (Harvest of Honours). 

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Born to a Palestinian refugee and an American mother, Naomi Shihab Nye has shed light on global conflicts with a thorough, lyrical approach. For her, “the primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” 

She has received numerous awards, including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle, the Lavan Award and the Lavan Award for poets aged 40 and under. After the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, Nye delved more into the experiences of Arab Americans through 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East.

Two-time Palanca Award winner Conchitina Cruz previously balanced her medical studies with creative writing before focusing on developing her career in literature. Her works include the chapbook Disappear (2005), Dark Hours (2005), elsewhere held and lingered (2008), and more. In 2009, she co-edited High Chair 12, a journal that shed unflinching light on the Maguindanao Massacre. She now teaches creative writing and comparative literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman. 

For Cruz, it is essential to explore the monotony and repetition of daily life, which she thinks “tend to be excised from a piece of writing for it to become a poem.” Through this examination, she creates “means for the ruins to become liveable–continuing access to the humdrum must mean that indeed, life goes on.” 

“I began to write in an Ireland where the word ‘woman’ and the word ‘poet’ seemed to be in some sort of magnetic opposition to each other,” says the Dublin-born poet Eavan Boland. “I wanted to put the life I lived into the poem I wrote. And the life I lived was a woman’s life. And I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.”

Bolan infuses her perceptions of Irish history and mythology with a deep immersion in domestic life, exploring issues like cancer, domestic violence and eating disorders. Some of her most notable works include the poetry books Outside History (1990) and In A Time of Violence (1994). 

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