The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time by Leslie Pockell, Katharine Rapkin (With), Adrienne Avila (With)

From the Publisher

Words of Love ...and seduction, heartbreak, adoration, and passion. Here in this portable treasury are the 100 most moving and memorable love poems of all time, each accompanied by an illuminating introduction. Revisit the Classics: "He Is More Than a Hero" by Sappho Sonnet 18 ("Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds") by William Shakespeare "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron Enjoy Old Favorites: "To My Dear and Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear "When I Was One and Twenty" by A. E. Housman Make Surprising Discoveries: "Your Catfish Friend" by Richard Brautigan "To Alice B. Toklas" by Gertrude Stein "Valentine" by Donald Hall "True Love" by Judith Viorst Carry this book wherever you go. It's a perfect companion to read alone or to share with that special person in your life. The 100 Best Love Poems of all Time.

Publishers Weekly

Entering the tradition begun with The 100 Best Poems of All Time and The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time is Leslie Pockell's anthology The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time, offering measured doses of cupidity. Working with Adrienne Avila and Katharine Rapkin, Pockell takes readers from Dante's Vita Nuova to love works by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton and by Rabindranath Tagore, Wislawa Szymborska and Frank O'Hara through to Gregory Orr, Judith Viorst and Sandra Cisneros.

KLIATT

As Pockell states in her introduction, these poems range from "idealistic romanticism to passionate sensuality." They include the ancient poets and the modern and most major language groups. The editor seems to favor the classic love poems over the more modern, perhaps because it's easier to discern what a love poem is with the older ones. There is only one poem per poet. Each poem is introduced with a one-paragraph background commentary. This collection is heavy on the classics, such as Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" (parodied on the facing page by Howard Moss's poem of the same name). Robert Burns' "A Red, Red Rose" is still fresh and melodic. For modern verse, e.e. cummings displays his unique parenthetical lines in "I Carry Your Heart With Me," a tender tribute to his love. The collection would not be complete without the Romantic poets. Byron's "She Walks In Beauty" is still as dramatic as on the first reading. Love includes all the real, often petty resentments that must be swept aside in its name, as Kenneth Fearing so aptly illustrates in "Love 20 Cents the First Quarter Mile." In some poems, the pure beauty of the line adds profundity to expressions of love, as in Neruda's "I Do Not Love You": "I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,/ in secret, between the shadow and the soul." The illicit nature of some love relationships is revealed in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's "Between Your Sheets," a yearning by an 18th-century woman ahead of her time. Tragedy, of course, is inherent in many love matches, so evident here in the facing poems of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, both describing the transformational quality of love. This concise volume can be agreat resource for study because of the variety of styles and forms from the colloquial to the arcane. At least one collection of love poetry should be in every library. Who, at some time in her life, doesn't need a love poem? KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Warner, 128p. index., Budin

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