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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 808.819353
EAN: 9780375411700
ISBN: 0375411704
Label: Everyman's Library
Manufacturer: Everyman's Library
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 256
Publication Date: 2001-05-15
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Product Release Date: 2001-05-15
Studio: Everyman's Library

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, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s “Love Misinterpreted” to Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” from May Swenson’s “Symmetrical Companion” to Muriel Rukeyser’s “Looking at Each Other,” these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Loved it, Loved It, LOVED IT!!
Review: This was the best money I've spent on a book this year, maybe ever, and although I'm not much of a poetry book-buyer, I read my share of books. (I've reviewed gay- and lesbian-themed books free-lance for over 15 years.) "Love Speaks Its Name" is simply an excellent anthology of gay- and lesbian-themed poetry with artists as diverse as Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, Cavafy, Cole Porter, and several Baby Boomers sounding off on AIDS as well as traditional themes of love.

Why do I like this little volume so much? For one thing, it's part of the well-regarded "Everyman" library, which is to Knopf what Modern Library is to Random House. This means you can purchase identically-sized volumes of literature, even erotic poetry, from the same line. The publishers of "Love Speaks Its Name" took a fairly traditional, quality-oriented approach to content (including recent poets, as I said); but although the binding is a conservative navy blue the bound-in bookmarker ribbon is lavender (cute, no?).

Most of the anthologies of gay or lesbian poetry I've reviewed over the past 15 years fall into one of two categories (1) the professor had some favors to pay off, so excellence took a back seat to other factors (though in many cases you might not know this from the impenetrable deconstructionist jargon that constitutes the introduction); or, (2) the regional "Let's assemble a book! All comers welcome!" Well meant, but not always successful. With its erudition, user-friendly language and delineation of Love into themes like "Longing" and "Ecstasy," "Love Speaks Its Name" is a class act all the way.

For a ridiculously small amount of money you can immerse yourself in this book and find out just why Cavafy is so highly regarded, even in translation, why Auden is still audacious today, why Amy Levy's young death was such a loss to the world of poetry, and discover the NON-bowdlerized lyrics to "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" (there are so many versions floating around it's hard to find the real deal).

What more can I say? Buy it. If you hate it, you won't have wasted much money and you can mail it as a Christmas gift ...

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