Passionfood is a feast of classic and contemporary love poems. There are a hundred flavours in this four-course celebration of love, passion and desire. Compiled by Staying Alive editor Neil Astley, its menu is distinctively different from that of other anthologies of love poetry. There are no broken hearts here. Passionfood is a celebration of true love - love that grows into love that lasts, love that fills every part of our lives, love that never leaves us. Passionfood opens with a starter selection of poems about attraction, desire and longing. Passion is the main course: the excitement of love, being and staying in love, including many of the greatest poems in our literature - by writers such as Shakespeare, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Yeats and Auden. For dessert, the book offers deliciously saucy poems by leading contemporary poets. But like love, Passionfood is a feast which doesn't have to end. The fruit that follows dessert offers still more poetry to savour: poems about deepening love and friendship, love that never leaves us, poems celebrating closeness, trust and mutual understanding, poems of joy, wisdom and shared recognition. Passionfood is a book of positive, provocative and witty love poems for everyone whose life has been nourished and sustained by love, mixing passion with food for thought. It's also a book which holds out hope, and as such, a perfect gift for the person you love, for weddings and engagements, birthdays, anniversaries and Valentine's Day. This new edition is beautifully presented in a quarter-bound hardback gift format.

About the Author
Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978. His books include novels, poetry collections and anthologies, most notably those in Bloodaxe's Staying Alive anthology series: Staying Alive (2002), Being Alive (2004), Being Human (2011), and Staying Human (2020), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation; and three collaborations with Pamela Robertson-Pearce, Soul Food: nourishing poems for starved minds (2008), and the DVD-books In Person: 30 Poets (2008) and In Person: World Poets (2017). He has published two novels, The End of My Tether (2002), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, and The Sheep Who Changed the World (2005). He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry, was given a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books, and in 2018 was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He also guest-edited a transatlantic all-poetry issue of the American literary journal Ploughshares, the first such issue in its 43-year history. He lives in the Tarset Valley of Northumberland, England.


Book Information
ISBN 9781852248697
Author Neil Astley
Format Hardback
Page Count 128
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd