Listing content on a page other than front page etc

Noob with Drupal but not CMS in general - have reviewed v5 vs v6 and plumped for the latter because it seems like getting the desired look and feel for the 2-3 of sites I need to build will be easier and it will be a more suitable way of learning the product. Now of course I observe that a great many modules are not 6.x ready including CCK etc. I am happy to hack some bits of PHP etc to get what I need but don't wnat to spend days writing modules which are going to emerge anyway from more stable histories. Plus more seems to be happening than with other CMS products I could mention.

In the light of this is there an easy way of doing the following:

One of my site owners wants to be able to list things (these could be poems, books etc) and she wants to be able to have a page (or pages) on her site which effectively list the titles and/or teasers of these items much as the "promote to front page" stuff does. These subpages would ideally not be included in the main Navigation menu structures as they may contain a few dozen items.

So the menu structure should be something like:

Home
My Poems
About
Contact

When someone clicks My Poems they should get a page (either instead of or as well as the content of the "My Poems" page in the CMS itself) where the content is a page which shows the titles of the pages listed below "My Poems" and users can click this list. Ideally this list would allow paging and sorting etc but this isn't essential. Same thing would be good for Books etc.

What suggestions?

TIA,
Roland