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A review by versmonesprit
The Poetry of Sex by Sophie Hannah
emotional
funny
lighthearted
fast-paced
2.0
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe a certain thought process should be put into the selection of anthologies beyond “these are what I wanted to put together,” because such an approach is both incredibly lazy, and a tangible proof of inadequacy for the task at hand.
In her introduction (in which she goes on and on and on about Daniel Craig for literally a whole page! because there are in fact two poems about him in this book! and neither are remotely good!) Sophie Hannah expresses her belief this could be the “raunchiest anthology” of its year of publication. So you wouldn’t be amiss in thinking these poems would be raunchy, right?
Well, it might be crazy what I’m about to say, but you would be, actually! For the most part, the poems gave nothing close to erotic/salacious sex. For reference, there were only one poem each by Catullus and Cummings — THE two names you would think of when it comes to “raunchy, sexual”. And there were in fact several times the same poets appeared (which again I think is a bit lazy, ngl) so I have no clue why that choice excluded them.
Speaking of lazy choices, there were some incredibly long poems (they were not at all fine examples of poetry either) that went on for far too many pages, several other poems could have been included in their place. Considering their very mid quality, it seems like they were chosen specifically to take up space, because Sophie Hannah seems to have been struggling with finding poems for this book already.
But I’m nothing if not honest. While there were some quite terrible poems, there were others I got to discover through this anthology that I really liked! In fact, I bought another copy as a gift because I know my friend will have even more fun reading those than I did!
Alas, circling back to the introduction… it’s the main reason I changed my rating from the intended 3 stars to the 2 here. Sophie Hannah had such a cringy millennial tone, I was already dead set on never reading anything by her. But no, she couldn’t have that! She had to go ahead and insert one of her own poems in an anthology she was editing, because that doesn’t seem like cheap self-promo at all! So yeah, this is a cringe-based review. The entire content list is on the Google Books preview, so if you can find them online or through libraries, I’m going to recommend you to go that route.
Oh and one last note: the selected translation for Ovid sounded horrendously modern. Why not choose a better translation?
In her introduction (in which she goes on and on and on about Daniel Craig for literally a whole page! because there are in fact two poems about him in this book! and neither are remotely good!) Sophie Hannah expresses her belief this could be the “raunchiest anthology” of its year of publication. So you wouldn’t be amiss in thinking these poems would be raunchy, right?
Well, it might be crazy what I’m about to say, but you would be, actually! For the most part, the poems gave nothing close to erotic/salacious sex. For reference, there were only one poem each by Catullus and Cummings — THE two names you would think of when it comes to “raunchy, sexual”. And there were in fact several times the same poets appeared (which again I think is a bit lazy, ngl) so I have no clue why that choice excluded them.
Speaking of lazy choices, there were some incredibly long poems (they were not at all fine examples of poetry either) that went on for far too many pages, several other poems could have been included in their place. Considering their very mid quality, it seems like they were chosen specifically to take up space, because Sophie Hannah seems to have been struggling with finding poems for this book already.
But I’m nothing if not honest. While there were some quite terrible poems, there were others I got to discover through this anthology that I really liked! In fact, I bought another copy as a gift because I know my friend will have even more fun reading those than I did!
Alas, circling back to the introduction… it’s the main reason I changed my rating from the intended 3 stars to the 2 here. Sophie Hannah had such a cringy millennial tone, I was already dead set on never reading anything by her. But no, she couldn’t have that! She had to go ahead and insert one of her own poems in an anthology she was editing, because that doesn’t seem like cheap self-promo at all! So yeah, this is a cringe-based review. The entire content list is on the Google Books preview, so if you can find them online or through libraries, I’m going to recommend you to go that route.
Oh and one last note: the selected translation for Ovid sounded horrendously modern. Why not choose a better translation?