The Perfect Gift

With a best friend birthday coming up, I was eager to find the perfect present.

She is much like me a true romantic so straight to Amazon I went looking, finding a poetry book selected by Laura Barber. Her description matched that of my friend, “As the editor of Penguin's Poems for Life and Penguin's Poems by Heart, she has lived, breathed and dreamed poetry – in libraries and on lawns, on beaches and in bed.”

Ideal......... Penguins Poems for Love;

This poetry will take you on a journey from the ‘suddenly’ of love at first sight to the ‘truly, madly, deeply’ of infatuation and on to the ‘eternally’ of love that lasts beyond the end of life, along the way taking in flirtation, passion, fury, betrayal and broken hearts. Bringing together the greatest love poetry from around the world and through the ages, ranging from W. H. Auden to William Shakespeare, John Donne to Emily Dickinson, Robert Browning to Roger McGough, this new anthology will delight, comfort and inspire anyone who has ever tasted love – in any of its forms.

(rrp £20.00)

I’ll leave a taste of the power of poetry.

(Lets hope she likes it!)

I hid my love when love till I

Couldn’t bear the buzzing fly;

I hid my love to my despite

Till I could not bear the light;

I dare not gaze upon her face

But left her memory in each place;

Where’er I saw a wild flower lie

I kissed and blade my love goodbye.

I met her in the greenest dells,

Where dewdrops pearl the wood bluebells;

The lost breeze kissed her bright blue eyes,

The bee kissed and went singing by,

A sunbeam found a passage there,

A gold chain round her neck so fair;

As secret as the wild bee’s song

She lay there all the summer long.

I hid my love in field and town

Till e’en the breeze would knock me down;

The bees seemed singing ballads o’er,

The fly’s buzz turned a lion’s roar;

And even silence found a tongue,

To haunt me all the all summer long;

The riddle nature could not prove

Was nothing else but secret love.

John Clare

Photograph, Suffolk by Rhian Brighton