A Wise Choice 7. “From the Dressing-Room” by Medbh McGuckian
Of course, this is not an exhaustive (or even overly authoritative) list. Sometimes a plantain is not just a plantain!6. Check out the list below! The question is whether you will write fearlessly. Modern Love (1862), a series of 50 connected poems, reflects his own experience in relating the tragic dissolution of a marriage. Among the many clever pleasures of this poem, my favorite is the one found in the last three lines. I thought this year I'd share my top 10 best love poems ever written. ), as if this poem too were an act of clairvoyance, the language scrying itself—dressing rooms require mirrors, after all—for a glimpse of the Beloved. “Sonnet XX” by Pablo Neruda
“Formerly Communist Love Sonnet” by Connie Deanovich
Of the 100 love sonnets in Pablo Neruda’s collection, this one appeals to me most.
It's just my favorites, and I encourage everyone to share their favorites in the comments below.
I translated this sonnet myself, though readers are encouraged to seek out Stephen Tapscott’s translations in the University of Texas Press edition of 100 Love Sonnets, published in 1986. I’m also tickled by the double entendre at the end of the poem: it’s always fun to end on a climactic moment.5. Or is this a stranger at all? search. . .” may lack delicacy but not elegance, as these epigrammatic couplets are models of brevity: “you arrive at night inspired and drunk, / there is no reason for our clothes.” Needless to say, this is a perfectly accessible, clear, and simple poem that anyone can understand. The cataloguing of the body of the beloved, finding everything perfect—this excerpt captures that swoony experience.2. Guthrie’s blazon is an incantatory spell: as she inventories her boyfriend’s parts she inventories the world, and in his valorization becomes herself a giantess!4. Although Meredith began and ended his literary career as a poet, he is best remembered as a novelist.
“July” by Kazim Ali
Breton ends L’Amour Fou with a beatific letter to his only child, Aube: “My little child, just eight months old, always smiling, made at once like coral and like pearls, you will know then that any element of chance was strictly excluded from your coming, that your birth came about at the exact time that it was supposed to, neither sooner nor later, and that no shadow was awaiting you above your wicker cradle.” “Sunflower,” then, did not augur just any love affair, but one that would fulfill the great alchemical promise of love: a daughter.2.
1. “Chance Meeting” by Susan Browne
.
If you love to write and have a story you want to tell, the only thing that can stand between you and the success you’re seeking isn’t craft, or a good agent, or enough Facebook friends and Twitter followers, but fear. In any case, here Cervantes has crafted a gorgeous love poem so heavy with passion that it will wilt the flowers on the wallpaper.4. . “A un Desconocido” by Lorna Dee Cervantes