'The New Faber Book of Love Poems' presents some of the most emotive and memorable lyric poems produced in the English language from the Renaissance to the present.

In the thirty years since its publication, The Faber Book of Love Poems has become a classic on any bookshelf. Now for the new millennium comes an entirely new edition, personally selected and introduced by James Fenton, a Whitbread-winning poet himself, rightly famed for his own love poetry. Organised according to poets, rather than subjects, the edition celebrates love poetry originating in the English language, from Wyatt to the present day. It includes blues lyrics, American folk poetry, Elizabethan lyrics, Broadway songs, and a full range of poetic styles from the aristocratic to the popular. Eminently readable and engaging, The New Faber Book of Love Poetry presents some of the most emotive and memorable lyric poems produced in the English language from the Renaissance to the present day.

Publisher Description

The poems in this collection include many about being in love, the wonder and longing, the misery of separation, the pain of rejection, while others are in praise of love. They span the centuries and include some examples in French. Apart from the recognized masters to the form, lesser known poets are represented who, by a single experience of love, have been raised to a higher level of exceptional lyricism.

Geoffrey Grigson was arguably the century's greatest poetry anthologist - a man whose breadth of reading was equalled only by his infallible taste. To every anthology, Grigson brought his habitual enthusiasm and his flair for the recondite. The Faber Book of Love Poems is no exception - a task undertaken con amore by a well-furnished mind and an experienced heart.

How can you say goodbye to the love of your life? In Undying Michel Faber honours the memory of his wife, who died after a six-year battle with cancer. Bright, tragic and candid, these poems are an exceptional chronicle of what it means to find the love of your life. And what it is like to have to say goodbye. All I can do, in what remains of my brief time, is mention, to whoever cares to listen, that a woman once existed, who was kind and beautiful and brave, and I will not forget how the world was altered, beyond recognition, when we met.

'But tonight I am super-charged, alive, looking into the eyes of / men . . .' In this intimate and vital debut, Richard Scott looks into the places not everyone sees or chooses to see. Against the backdrop of London's Soho, he creates an uncompromising portrait of love and shame, questioning our sense of the permissible and the perverse. Scott takes us back to our roots: childhood incidents, the violence our scars betray, forgotten forebears and histories. The hungers of sexual encounters are underscored by the risks that threaten when we give ourselves to or accept another. But the poems celebrate joy and tenderness, too, as in a sequence re-imagining the love poetry of Verlaine. The collection crescendos to the title-poem, 'Soho!', where a night stroll under the street lamps becomes a search for 'true lineage', a reclamation of stolen ancestors, hope for healing, and, above all, the finding of our truest selves.