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Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems
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From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter–a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry.
The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate ...more
The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate ...more
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Start your review of Love Speaks Its Name: Gay and Lesbian Love Poems
we are so lucky to experience gay love
stopped midway through to eat a ripe persimmon over my sink, that is love
I read this volume slowly over a number of months, a few poems before bed every night. It was a great way to end the day. The book is organized into several different themed sections that sort of chart the course of a relationship: Longing, Looking, Loving, Ecstasy, Anxiety, and Aftermath. The there is a good variety of poems authored by both men and women. I appreciated that the book reintroduced me to poems buy poets I had not heard of and reintroduced me to old favorites. It's a great book fo
...more
nothing in this world compares to how tender and beautiful gay love is
Great choices and categories. I do wish there were more female entries.
This book was a gift of a dear friend of mine. A friend that is always going to stay my friend no matter what.
Ich vermisse dich
Poem
by Frank O'Hara
I will always love you
though I never loved you
a boy smelling faintly of heather
staring up at your window
the passion that enlightens
and stills and cultivates, gone
while I sought your face
to be familiar in the blueness
or to follow your sharp whistle
around a corner into my light
that was love growing fainter
each time you failed to appear
I spent my whole ...more
Ich vermisse dich
Poem
by Frank O'Hara
I will always love you
though I never loved you
a boy smelling faintly of heather
staring up at your window
the passion that enlightens
and stills and cultivates, gone
while I sought your face
to be familiar in the blueness
or to follow your sharp whistle
around a corner into my light
that was love growing fainter
each time you failed to appear
I spent my whole ...more
Not quoting individual authors here out of inertia, forgive me.
"Dapple-throned Aphrodite,
eternal daughter of God,
snare-knitter!"
"Who, Sappho, is
unfair to you?"
"The dawning day has clouds in store;
Desire her cloudy moods;
And sunlit woods of morning may
By noon be darkened woods."
"I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon."
"Distant like a dark and wounded doe
Sweet like sobbing during the fall of snow.
Distant and sweet, and caught in the marrow!"
"Time will find us wasted."
"Starkly I re ...more
"Dapple-throned Aphrodite,
eternal daughter of God,
snare-knitter!"
"Who, Sappho, is
unfair to you?"
"The dawning day has clouds in store;
Desire her cloudy moods;
And sunlit woods of morning may
By noon be darkened woods."
"I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon."
"Distant like a dark and wounded doe
Sweet like sobbing during the fall of snow.
Distant and sweet, and caught in the marrow!"
"Time will find us wasted."
"Starkly I re ...more
Every now and then I fall apart, uh, no. Every now and then I encounter books that literally change my life, or at least push my reading in a very different direction. This is such a book. Because of this collection I spend more than 200 € on other poetry collections, and I have no regrets. It’s an excellent collection of gay and lesbian poetry. The percentage of lesbian poetry could be higher, but I admit it was some of the male poets whose work resonated most for me. I highly recommend this to
...more
A selection of stunning poems placed into five evocative and relatable sections.
I really enjoyed this collection of poems, and it introduced me to quite a few new gay and lesbian poets. I appreciated how it was divided into stages of love: longing, looking, loving, ecstasy, anxiety, and aftermath.
My favorite poems in the sections included:
Longing:
•Be Kind to Me by Sappho
•At Baia by H.D.
•He Asked About the Quality by Constantine Cavafy
Looking
•At a Dinner Party by Amy Levy
Loving
•The Bandaged Shoulder by Constantine Cavafy
•I Get a Kick Out of You by Cole Porter
•Keeping Time by ...more
My favorite poems in the sections included:
Longing:
•Be Kind to Me by Sappho
•At Baia by H.D.
•He Asked About the Quality by Constantine Cavafy
Looking
•At a Dinner Party by Amy Levy
Loving
•The Bandaged Shoulder by Constantine Cavafy
•I Get a Kick Out of You by Cole Porter
•Keeping Time by ...more
Hadn't read Funeral Blues since GCSE English, forgotten how excellent it is.
This is a highly recommendable lovely collection of gay and lesbian love poems. What could be a better day to post about this than on this International Day Against Homophobia. The authors range from Cole Porter, W.H. Auden, Federico García Lorca, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein and many more. It's sorted into Longing, Looking, Loving, Ecstasy, Anxiety and Aftermath. Just this sorting shows how much thought has been put into this collection.
Another great volume in the Everyman's Library of Pocked ...more
Another great volume in the Everyman's Library of Pocked ...more
Reading some of these verses was a very emotional experience. I absolutely loved this poetry collection - some I knew, but so many were new to me. It's one of those books that'll sit on the corner of my desk and I'll keep coming back to. I'm now away down a rabbit hole to explore more work from 2 of the poets that were new to me, and I regret nothing. Five stars.
One of the things I like about anthologies is discovering someone I want to read more of. In this case it was James Baldwin - I have read most of his novels and non-fiction, but until now none of his poetry. Apart from him there are many other wonderful poets represented here, and I expect I will come back to this book many times. Part of the lovely Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series.
It's so good that I carry it with me everyday.
Only one marilynne hacker poem? Cmon
I skipped some of the poems. I might be biased, but I thought the wlw poems were all better than the mlm ones.
Exquisitely gay! The perfect mix of love poems, lust poems and poems about shame and death, as any gay poem collection needs. Absolutely lovely.
A beautiful collection. I had planned to space it out and read only a few each night, but ended up drinking it down over a month. I couldn't stop, it was so delicious. It would be better if more of the poets were female.
I don't think there is a weak installment in this series.
Beautiful lyrical poems by Federico Garcia Lorca are included in this book. Had to return to library before reading it all; will definitely try again.
My poetry professor is in this book! On a less personal note, this is a nice(though a little male heavy)assortment of poems.
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McClatchy is an adjunct professor at Yale University and editor of the Yale Review. He also edits the "Voice of the Poet" series for Random House AudioBooks.
His book Hazmat (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) was nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. He has written texts for musical settings, including eight opera libretti, for such composers as Elliot Goldenthal, Daron Hagen, Lowell Liebermann, Lorin Maazel ...more
His book Hazmat (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) was nominated for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. He has written texts for musical settings, including eight opera libretti, for such composers as Elliot Goldenthal, Daron Hagen, Lowell Liebermann, Lorin Maazel ...more
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“The very conventions of poetry were devised to encode experience, to make it less obvious and thereby more true. To make a metaphor, after all, is to describe something in terms of what it is not, the better to apprehend what it is.”
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“Love is the quality of attention we pay to things”
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