Publisher's Synopsis
The essential love poem anthology
Gem Love Poems is a collection of around 140 classic love lyrics (published in time for Valentine's Day), from the heartbreak of Sappho
The moon sinks, and the Pleiades:
Midnight is come, the watchman passes,
And I lie here alone.
to the antidote of Wendy Cope
The day he moved out was terrible -
That evening she went through hell.
His absence wasn't a problem
But the corkscrew had gone as well.
Gem Love Poems will be the ideal gift for all lovers of poetry - indeed the ideal gift for all lovers. Here is the poem written by Leo Marks for Violet Szabo which she carried into Nazi-occupied Europe -
The life that I have is all that I have
And the life that I have is yours.
The love that I have of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
And the eternal wisdom of Don Marquis's shameless alley cat, Mehitabel -
i once was an innocent kit
wotthehell wotthehell
with a ribbon my neck to fit
and bells tied on to it
o wotthehell wottthehell
but a maltese cat came by
with a come hither look in his eye.
From the Introduction by UA Fanthorpe: 'an anthology of love
poems is far from monotonous. It can modulate from friendship, through
lifelong devotion, to sheer blunt lust. There is He and She,
of course, but there is also the reader-over-their-shoulder. Love poems, I
suspect, are not just written for that impossible she, but for this expected
voyeur. And the interesting thing is that we, the readers, are prepared to
take what the poets say, whatever it may be, as gospel truth. This is where
love poetry differs from all other kinds..read this for its wit, its generosity, its bird-song, its consistency. Love and poetry - two things we?re good at.'
