The Virago Book of Love Poetry by 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.
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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.