**A uniquely international anthology--in a beautiful pocket-sized
hardcover--that explores the richly symbolic expressiveness of flowers
through poems from around the world and through the ages. AN EVERYMAN'S
LIBRARY POCKET POET.
**
Floral symbols adorn the earliest poetry, and over the centuries they
became increasingly entwined with myth and legend, with religious
symbolism, and with herbal folklore. By the early nineteenth century the
"Language of Flora" was an elaborately refined system, especially in
England and America, where books listing flower meanings and
illustrating them with verse were perennial bestsellers.
Transcending the charm of its Victorian predecessors, this anthology
creates an extended, updated, and more robust floral anthology for the
twenty-first century, presenting poets through the ages from Sappho,
Shakespeare, and Shelley to Ted Hughes, Mary Oliver, and Louise Glück,
and across the world from Cuba to Korea, Russia to Zimbabwe. Eastern
cultures, rich in flower associations, are well represented: Tang poems
celebrating chrysanthemums and peonies, Zen poems about orchids and
lotus flowers, poems about jasmine and marigolds from India, and roses
and narcissi from Persia, the Ottoman empire, and the Arabic world. The
most timeless human emotions and concepts--love, hope, despair,
fidelity, grief, beauty, and mortality--find colorful expression in The
Language of Flowers.
