A new anthology, Poems That Make Grown Women Cry (Simon & Schuster UK, £9.99), has a double appeal, both for the range of poems (from Emily Dickinson to Yeats) and for the personal and critical insights offered by the 100 women (from Vanessa Redgrave to Annie Lennox) who chose them.

Below, Sharon Olds admires Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays and describes the points at which she begins to “choke up.”

Claire Bloom finds Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art hiding “a deep and enduring sorrow” under its ironic tone.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labour in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

~

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

~

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

Of love’s austere and lonely offices?

              ONE ART

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

~

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

~

Then practise losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

~

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

~

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

~

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.