The Virago Book of Love Poetry
Wendy Mulford
For centuries women have written about love with passion, humour, frustration and despair; but never before have their voices come together as in this exhilarating and timeless compendium. Here are love poems in all their true, subversive drama, delicately arranged according to a balance of moods and modes: of argument and lyric, joke and passionate utterance, rejection, rage and ecstacy. Poets, well-known and obscure, ancient and modern from Sappho to Akhamotova,Patti Smith to Selima Hill, Sylvia Plath to Alice Walker all challenge the traditional perception of women as muse and object of desire, and magnificently transcend it. — The Virago Book of Love Poetry (Mulford, 1990: xiii). Mulford places lesbian and heterosexual poets alongside each other and declares that the book ‘ignores boundaries, aiming to demonstrate the affinities and continuities between many kinds of love’. This is a superb collection of writing by a diversity of women but, quietly, I worry. Does this commitment to diversity in the end mean that lesbian difference can comfortably be glossed over, can it yield without loss, to a higher order dedication to theme? Does such a movement depoliticize, fragment, and diffuse/de-fuse lesbian specificities? ~ Liz Yorke, ‘British Lesbian Poetics: A Brief Exploration’, Feminist Review , Summer, 1999, No. 62, Contemporary Women Poets (Summer, 1999), pp. 78-90 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
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Details
| ISBN | 9781853810305 |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Publication Date | 1990 |
| Publisher | Virago |
| No. of Pages | 288 |
| Notes | Lesbian content within the book. |
| LoC Classification | PN6110 .L6 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| Subject | Love Poetry; Poetry; Poetry / General |
| BookID | 15365 |
