I just ordered two books of poetry from amazon.com, and I have to say that they were money well-spent. The first one was a Penguin collection of 500 years of the sonnet, and just going through it makes me wish I could write them better. I've never had the discipline to try my hand at them. Just thinking of trying to write in iambic pentameter makes my head hurt. I love to read them, though. Well-written ones are that much more lovely to me because of the extra rigor involved in keeping the form. Claude McKay's sonnets amaze me. A collection of his stuff is next on my "to buy list."
The other book of poetry I bought was, and don't laugh, an Everyman Library Pocket Book of Love Poems. The Hopeless Romantic (not Hopeful, that's my friend) just couldn't resist it when it came up as a "Customers who bought this book also liked...." as I was putting the sonnet collection into my cart. It's fabulous. I spent time I should have been sleeping last night going through it and marking poems that moved me. About half the book has little post-it flags on it now. All I need now is somebody who enjoys them to talk to about them. HA!!!!!! Yeah, they're lining up around the corner for THAT...more like fleeing at top speed.
In all seriousness, it's one of the nicest collections of love poems I've seen. Some of the expected ones are there, Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, "She Walks in Beauty like the Night", and so forth, but there are also translations of things I've never heard of from ancient texts and other languages that are powerful. Combined with incipient Spring, they have my stupid, sappy heart sighing. Ah well, at least I can enjoy the poems....
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And then you said.....