A review by dvlavieri
Love Poems by Peter Washington

4.0

A lovely collection. Though, as with any and all collections, what stands out in my mind is not what was included, but was notably excluded: "If You Forget Me" by Neruda, many of Edna St. Vincent Millay's later sonnets, some Sapphic fragments, W.H. Auden's "The More Loving One" (a personal favorite), Szymborska's "First Love," the heartbreak of Anne Sexton's "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife" - and many others. But I was happy to discover in this collection some new poems and poets of which I'd never head of, or long forgotten: Pierre de Ronsard (and old favorite), Louis Untermeyer, some of the under-appreciated poems of James Joyce, Edward Thomas's "No One So Much As You." The partitioning of the book into various stages of love seemed a good idea, but perhaps haphazard; while some categorization is nice in a collection like this, it seemed that many poems could have fallen into a number of those descriptions - thus is poetry!