Love Poems Books

Love Letters of Great Men

John C. Kirkland

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Love Letters of Great Men 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

It is interesting to know and understand the concept of great writings enduring the years. This writing has done just that, extremely enjoyable and informative of writers from the past incomparison to the present.

Editorial Review:

When words of love do not come to you on their own, then read these letters. Complete, actual love letters of great men like Lord Byron, John Keats and Voltaire. Leaders like Henry VIII, George Washington, and Napoléon, who wrote to his beloved Joséphine, 'I awake consumed with thoughts of you...' Artists like van Gogh, Mozart, and Beethoven, who famously penned, 'Though still in bed, my thoughts go out to you, my Immortal Beloved...' Dozens of intimate letters, coupled with over a score of period illustrations. Plus fascinating biographies, and insights into the couples' relationships-how they got there, the obstacles they faced, and what happened next. Poet warriors, from the first through the twentieth century, including: Ovid, Sir Walter Raleigh, Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Shelley, Robert Browning, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Pierre Curie, George Bernard Shaw, Jack London, Admiral Peary, Woodrow Wilson, and many more.

The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time

Leslie Pockell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Elegant and Classic 5 out of 5 stars.
19 of 19 people found this review helpful.

How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul?
How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote lost objects,
in some dark and silent place that doesn't resonate
when our depths resound. ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Leslie Pockell has created a collection of 100 Love Poems in order to explore the many facets of love's expression. The poems range from passionate longings to realistic portrayals (Judith Viorst's True Love). There are images of love's transcendence and safety. Everything from ecstasy to grief is included. Classics like To Helen by Edgar Allan Poe are very familiar.

The River Merchant's Wife by Li Po brings elegant beauty and Strawberries by Edwin Morgan dips into memories of storms while eating strawberries in sugar, one of my all-time favorite poems because of the ending. Katherine Mansfield's poem about tea is warm and satisfying. The flow and rhythm in many of the poems is especially comforting.

The wide range of emotions within the poems also allows for a few moments of sarcasm (Love 20 Cents the First Quarter Mile by Kenneth Fearing) and even humor that is adorably funny. Your Catfish Friend by Richard Brautigan is witty and cute and looks at love from an especially creative perspective. This allows for poems with personality and lightens the heavier content and melancholy love often reveals.

Complete poems and extracts mingle effortlessly through the pages. Each poem is accompanied by an insightful explanation that also sheds light on historical facts and the life of the poet. In Love Song by Rainer Maria Rilke we learn of his lifelong melancholy and Leslie Pockell explains how he is conscious of the distance between lovers playing an "essential part in sustaining the mystery of love and life." Her ideas flow with the poems in a beautiful celebration of poetry. She gives only enough information to introduce the poem and does not provide extended commentary.

Poets featured in this collection include: Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Howard Moss, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Burns, Robert Graves, Rumi, Sir John Suckling, E.E. Cummings, Frances Cornford, Sir Philip Sidney, Guillaume Apollinaire, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Walt Witman, Pablo Neruda, William Blake, Robert Frost, Catullus, Octavio Paz, Tzumi Shikibu, Sylvia Plath, Li Po, D.H. Lawrence, John Keats, Ted Hughes, Margaret Atwood and many more...

There are 100 poets featured in this book. Whether you are a hopeless romantic or enjoy thinking about the many aspects of love, this book has much to offer. I can almost guarantee you will find 5 poems to adore, 10 you want to read again and again and 20 new poets you are happy to have found.

~The Rebecca Review

Editorial Review:

Here, in one compact volume, is a greatest hits collection of the 100 bets love poems ever written by 100 of the world's greatest poets. This essential anthology is ideal for the romantic-and will inspire any cynic. The poets included range throughout the history of world literature: from the Classics (Sappho, Catullus) and Renaissance (Shakespeare, Donne, Dante) to the Romantics (Shelly, Keats, Wordsworth) and 20th century giants (Frost, Lorca, Graves), right down to the present day (Viorst, Patchen, Neruda). Each poem features a brief introduction, which details the poet's life history as well as the poem's significance.

Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

Coleman Barks

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Beautiful 4 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Rumi needs no praise from me and Barks' translation is beautiful, mysterious, and urgent. I find his introductions to the many sections especially moving. My only problem is that I ordered the book after I bought Barks' "The Essential Rumi," which changed me. This book has many overlaps. I'd have preferred to see more original translations, but as a first introduction, you can do no better.

Editorial Review:

Now in paperback, this is the definitive collection of America's bestselling poet Rumi's finest poems of love and lovers. In Coleman Barks' delightful and wise renderings, these poems will open your heart and soul to the lover inside and out.

'There are lovers content with longing.

I'm not one of them.'

Rumi is best known for his poems expressing the ecstasies and mysteries of love of all kinds – erotic, divine, friendship –and Coleman Barks collects here the best of those poems, ranging from the 'wholeness' one experiences with a true lover, to the grief of a lover's loss, and all the states in between: from the madness of sudden love to the shifting of a romance to deep friendship – these poems cover all 'the magnificent regions of the heart'.

100 Love Sonnets: Cien sonetos de amor (Texas Pan American Series) (Spanish Edition)

Pablo Neruda

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 54 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

If you've ever wished for a fresh and imaginative way of saying "I love you" to your beloved, peruse Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets. This intimate bilingual collection overflows with the master poet's signature sensuality and inventive imagery. Written in the 1950s for his cherished wife Matilde Urrutia, Neruda's earnest adoration leaps off the page in poem after poem: "Your heart is a clay toy shaped like a dove"; "Your kisses are clusters of fruit, fresh with dew." Thanks to translator Stephen Tapscott, Neruda's dreamy images carry over vividly from the Spanish and dance in the mind for days after they're read.

Neruda pays only loose tribute to the sonnet by employing a 14-line structure for each poem. As he says, his sonnets are made of wood, rather than the "silver, or crystal, or cannonfire" of a more refined sonnet. Neruda's humility is apparent as he refers again and again to the natural landscape of Isla Negra (the Pacific island where he and his wife lived) to describe his simple dedication to Matilde: "...I am like a scorched rock / that suddenly sings when you are near, because it drinks / the water you carry from the forest, in your voice."

Journeying from the erotic celebration of the body to the spiritual depths of eternal union, 100 Love Sonnets shows why "two happy lovers make one bread" and "waking, they leave one sun empty in their bed."

Great Love Poems (Dover Thrift Editions)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Inexpensive Collection of Classic Selections 3 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again.
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day.
~Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Great Love Poems is an inexpensive collection of classic selections. This anthology is a collection of poems from four centuries of literary creation.

Many of the poems are classic in themes of longing and loss. There are poems of great sorrow and poems of great passion. Most of the poems either reflect on the nature of love or seem to be written from the perspective of a lover.

I have recently discovered the effects of mood on the reading of poetry. These poems may seem overly dreary on an evening when you are missing the person you love or they can be seen more creatively in the light of day.

As you read poetry, the beauty is often in recognizing the reflection of your own emotions in the mirror of the poet's world. While reading Edmund Spenser's One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand, we can look back at love lost and see how our attempts at permanence are washed away by the waves of time itself.

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name,

You may recognize many famous poems throughout this work, although many were new to me. When we studied Andrew Marvell's "The Definition of Love" in school, how could the poem have meant as much in such an innocent state. Now, years later we understand impossibility, fate's jealous eye, the parallel lines that never meet. So, it is worth reading many of these poems again with new eyes and a more experienced heart.

Does Thomas Campbell's poem speak too much truth about love or is he simply focusing on infatuation and the fires of love?

Love's a fire that needs renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel:
Love's wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free, he soars enraptured.

In this tiny book, you will find Edgar Allan Poe's "To One in Paradise" and Robert Browning's beautiful "Meeting at Night" with images of a gray sea and a moon large and low. I love the images of miles of warm sea-scented beach and fields the lover must cross to hear the voice of his true love. D. H. Lawrence's Gloire de Dijon was a definite find. I also found quite a few poems with water images, which I love.

~The Rebecca Review

Editorial Review:

Treasury of over 150 familiar poems by English and American poets, including a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets, John Donne’s "The Ecstasy," William Blake’s "The Garden of Love," as well as works by W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Keats, Milton, Robert Frost and many more.

A Lover's Guide to the Kama Sutra

Virginia Reynolds

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Interesting but long 3 out of 5 stars.
16 of 18 people found this review helpful.

The Book was well written with a lot of explaining,
but too long paragraphs to catch the attention and
also to follow this type of loving concepts.
Interesting but a bit long and with few pictures.
Still a good book to read and ponder over.

Fun Book 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 19 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book as a party favor for my Bachelor Party. All the guys loved the book. The nice thing about this book is the pictures are not graphic like in other books. All the pictures are illustrated instead of real pictures. Have fun with it.

Cute idea! 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 32 people found this review helpful.

I bought this to send to my boyfriend who's in the air force as a little gag gift... definitly a cute little book!

not what I thought 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

this book is really short and has very little info. in it. If you're looking for a book of techniques or positions, this is not it.

Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Words Dipped in Pleasure 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

"Sex within a context of real love, commitment, and safety is expansive and deeply pleasurable." ~Wendy Maltz

Until I started writing my own poetry; there was no way to realize the depth of emotion present in intimate poems. How do you even remember everything that happens when almost unaware of time itself and captured in a mystery or moment of breathless wonder?

Do poets hover above themselves in some dreamlike state observing this ecstatic union awaiting its birth in words? Does the soul watch the body's pleasure, silently? It seems it does because when poems arrive often they spill out onto the page in line after line of meaningful remembrance without much effort or thought. These types of poems seem born of longing, fantasy, dreams and the ancient desires all humans share. There is also humor in some of the rhymes or a casual elegance.

Nikki Giovanni brings an amusing style to her poetry in "That Day." The poem dances with the pleasure of the rhyme.

if you've got the key
then i've got the door
let's do what we did
when we did it before

Peeling an Orange by Virginia Hamilton Adair also shows the playfulness of love as two lovers play with oranges and the spicy scent of orange oil fills the air.

There are poems that are more direct and sensual and they explore the depths of the human experience and often express our desire to feel loved until our bodies vibrate at a higher frequency. This subtle purr or contentment after a loving experience can actually be felt in the body, but it is often difficult to describe. Some of the lovers wish to die in this blissful state after union. Wendy Lee expresses this desire in "Seamless Beauty" where she wishes to "fall into a deep sleep and never wake up."

Many of the poems contain nature images, especially water, the moon and surprisingly...many images of moths. What more could I wish for? There are swarms of luminous moths or ecstasy in a desert sea. A few of the poems have culinary themes. Jay Farbstein remembers a scene in the kitchen and how the pleasure of tastes turns into a worshipful experience.

Mostly, this is beautiful creative writing with a sensual theme. There are poems reflecting on past loves, poems about intense sensual encounters (Making Love by Walt Farran) and others where the poet wishes for future fulfillment. Like in Thirst by Linda Alexander:

Like a blade of summer grass
turning towards a fragrance
of rain caught in the air's
cooling, I come back to you

Wendy Maltz has created a sensitive and sacred sanctuary of healthy sexual experience in which lovers give sexuality a unique voice filled with imagination and metaphor. This is beyond romance, but never abusive or degrading. There is still a subtle mystery present in most of the poems. I loved the images in On Entering the Sea where Nizar Qabbani speaks of his experience as a "sliding under the skin of water...like writing with jasmine water."

The poems are divided into five chapters: Anticipation & Desire, Self-Awareness & Discovery, Admiration & Appreciation, Union & Ecstasy and Afterglow & Remembrance.

The poets featured: Marge Piercy, Emily Dickinson, Patti Tana, Robert Browning, Robin Jacobson, Linda Alexander, Floyd Skloot, George Keithley, David Meuel, Debra Pennington Davis, Penny Harter, Nikki Giovanni, Rumi, Trudi Paraha, Vigrinia Hamilton Adair, Stephen Dunn, Abigail Albrecht, Sharon Olds, Octavio Paz, Nizar Qabbani, Anon, Cummings, Kenneth Rexroth, June Sylvester Saraceno and Penny Harter.

What is especially delicious about this book of poetry is the introduction to a variety of new poets. For many of the poets, this is the first time their poems were published. I fell in love with Trudi Paraha's poetry. Her descriptions of painting love poems over sheets went beyond creative. She plays with words as if they owned her heart.

The erotic human experience is often a place of immense pleasure and most of the poets in this book seem to be writing from a place of relationship, trust and honesty. There is a nurturing quality to the lust, a beautiful connection between souls and an almost spiritual element in the union of lovers in a comforting embrace and heartfelt connection.

David Meuel's poems are especially interesting. He speaks of talking in touches and listening to each other's fingertips. In just a few sentences he can create amazing situations of desire. "What Makes It Good" shows his talent and "Ten Years Together" displays a rare intimacy between souls.

While you may think of erotic poems as poetry to excite passion, I found many of these poems were dipped in pleasure, but still retained an element of comfort. This is the type of book you can read at night before you go to bed and it may even produce beautiful dreams of the person you love. Intimate Kisses is as much a kiss for the mind as for the heart.

Something like my soul slips from me
and goes to you,
without choice or question,
and wraps itself around you
all night, like the breath
of the moon
~Gina Zeitlin

Intimate Kisses is an excellent choice is you have longed to know the experience of poets who can deftly describe the devotional side of desire. If you love this book, you may want to look for Passionate Hearts: The Poetry of Sexual Love. I can highly recommend both selections because they focus on positive images of sexual love.

~The Rebecca Review

Editorial Review:

Following on the success of Passionate Hearts, Wendy Maltz continues her celebration of healthy sexuality with a new anthology of 121 poems that turn up the heat. Through some of the richest, most celebrated poetry ever written, Intimate Kisses revels in life's greatest mystery and breaks through negative cultural messages that what feels good must be bad, or that only second-rate erotica can excite.

A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Roland Barthes

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

His best book ? 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

A personal favourite. Captures admirably the absurdity of it all. Contains gems like `Even as he obsessively asks himself why he is not loved, the amorous subject lives in the belief that the loved object does love him but does not tell him so.' Also has what is probably the best paragraph ever written on jealousy: `As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy and from being common.'

Editorial Review:

"Barthes's most popular and unusual performance as a writer is A Lover's Discourse, a writing out of the discourse of love. This language—primarily the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, not exchanges of a lover with his or her partner—is unfashionable. Thought it is spoken by millions of people, diffused in our popular romances and television programs as well as in serious literature, there is no institution that explores, maintains, modifies, judges, repeats, and otherwise assumes responsibility for this discourse . . . Writing out the figures of a neglected discourse, Barthes surprises us in A Lover's Discourse by making love, in its most absurd and sentimental forms, an object of interest."—Jonathan Culler

The Beloved: Reflections on the Path of the Heart (Arkana)

Kahlil Gibran

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Reflections on the path of the heart 4 out of 5 stars.
17 of 20 people found this review helpful.

For Khalil Gibran, love was a way perhaps a supreme way of achieving self-realization and completeness as a human being. Anyone can live their life transformed by the all consuming power of an encounter with "The Beloved". Particularly in the Eastern cultures there are people trapped in joyless or organized marriages; their passions sacrificed to convention. It is these segments of people that Gibran has brilliantly targeted. Gibran can write very complex social issues in quite simple terms. He can make these issues in a way that can make the reader feel one is taking a walk in a quiet wood, or bathing in a cool stream.

During the course of his reading one can observe that Gibran is a fervernt and outspoken champion of the cause of human rights. He has waged a struggle to strengthen the recognition of youth's freedom of action in love, and abolish from the social structure some of the prevailing ancient marriage customs. He has a strong condemnation of traditions of pre-arranged marriages of children by their parents, in complete disregard of the wishes of those so betrothed.

The ill-fated story of Lyla in `The Brides Bed' is an eye witness account recorded by Khalil. Lyla with courage, anguish and heroism broke in fury from this custom. She brought as a result on her self consequences extremely tragic. This is best described in Khalil's prose:

"... Come you cowards! Fear not the specter of death whose greatness will refuse to approach your littleness and dread not this dagger, for it is a divine instrument which declines to touch your filthy bodies and empty hearts. Look at this handsome youth, he is my beloved and I killed him because I love him. .... We sought a bed worthy of our love in this world which you have made so small with your ignorance and traditions. .... Then the bride lifted her dagger towards the sky, and like a thirsty person who brings the edge of a drinking glass to her lips, she bought it down and planted it in her chest..."

In the `Vision' he describes the social convention issue faced by one:

".. I am a lost human heart, imprisoned in the foul dungeons of mans dictates; tied with chains of earthly authority, dead and forgotten by laughing humanity whose tounge is tied and whose eyes are empty of visible tears. ..."

Editorial Review:

Exquisite writings on love, marriage, and the spiritual union of souls add a fresh dimension to our understanding of the philosophy of love and the transformation of one's life through its all-encompassing power.