Homage to Eros - Dannie Abse

What rich pickings there are for an anthologist of love poems - haunting stories of enduring love or of love lost, not to mention wonderful confessions, often robustly comical, of pure lust. Dannie Abse, one of Britain's leading poets, has selected 100 poems - from the Song of Solomon, Catullus and Ovid, to recent masterworks by such poets as the Irish Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney, the British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and acclaimed American poet Robert Lowell. Here's Christopher Marlowe sighing, 'Come live with me and be my love' while Michael Drayton announces, 'Since there's no help, let us kiss and part.' Aphra Behn talks about the dilemma of loving two men equally; Marina Tsvetayeva, the Russian poet, asks her ex-lover, 'How is your life with the other one?'; the twelfth-century Welsh poet, Hywel, boasts of how many women he has had and five centuries later the Earl of Rochester recalls in shocking detail how he seduced Sylvia.