A great gift is one that surprises and delights (a six-pack of white crew socks is not a great gift, though a welcome one perhaps) and a book of poems can be a great gift — though, of course, it can also be one of those gifts that the recipient examines in pained silence, with a forced smile, as if it were a box of deceased clams. But one should be willing to take a chance for something as brilliant and gorgeous as poetry.

A literate person who, say, enjoys murder mysteries or biographies or histories and who associates poetry with elderly desiccated ladies in oxfords is all set for a great surprise and you're the one to spring it. You give your friend a classy book with a cover that says, "Beware — Poetic Sensibility Ahead," and your friend opens it and starts to read, and lo and behold there's a real person there with a gift of sympathetic incantation, who in ten or fifteen lines has their full attention. I'd suggest Maxine Kumin, Raymond Carver, Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, or Elizabeth Bishop.

Maxine Kumin is a grand old lady on a horse farm in New England who speaks her mind beautifully and I think any bright young woman would feel privileged to have her Selected Poems, but her newer stuff is great too, The Long Marriage and Looking for Luck.

Raymond Carver is the poet for men who don't read poetry and his work is neatly bundled up in All of Us: The Collected Poems. He's good for anybody, though. (Bukowski, too, the dear dotty old uncle of poetry, whose stuff is beautifully printed by Black Sparrow. Powells.com should have a link from Elmore Leonard to Charles Bukowski.)

Sharon Olds is a poet who talks straight to you about marriage and motherhood, children, sex (look up her poem "Topography"), and The Father and The Unswept Room are terrific.

The Poet Laureate of the U.S., Billy Collins, is a mensch of a poet you can take anywhere and give to anybody and his Sailing Alone around the Room collects the best of his very popular work. And he's funny, which is a good thing in this day and age.

Elizabeth Bishop, in my opinion, is an American classic whose rather slight body of work bears repeated reading. You can open her slender Complete Poems, 1927-1979 again and again and again and each time she bounces just as high.

And now, having mentioned five poets, I think of more — Robert Bly's Morning Poems and The Night Abraham Called to The Stars and Donald Hall's Life Work and The Old Life and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present edited by David Lehman. And then there's that classy hardbound volume of Shakespeare's sonnets. And there's Cummings, the high school favorite ("whoever pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you" is the anthem of a million sophomores) and Whitman, America's No. 1 wedding poet.

All of these are poets you can give to people who ain't necessarily readers of poetry.

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