Passionfood: 100 Love Poems

Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978. His books include novels, poetry collections and anthologies, most notably the Bloodaxe Staying Alive trilogy: Staying Alive (Bloodaxe, UK 2002/ Miramax, US 2003), Being Alive (2004) and Being Human (2011), along with Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (2012). His other anthologies (all these from Bloodaxe) include Earth Shattering: ecopoems (2007), The Hundred Years' War: modern war poems (2014), and three collaborations with 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). In 2012 Candlestick Press published his selection of Ten Poems About Sheep in its renowned pamphlet series. In 2015 he guest-edited a special international issue of the American literary journal Ploughshares, its first all-poetry issue in its 44-year history. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry from the Society of Authors in 1982 and was given a D.Litt from Newcastle University for his work with Bloodaxe Books in 1995. He is a trustee of Ledbury Poetry Festival, and a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University. He was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

• Passionfood includes poems by Fleur Adcock, Kim Addonizio, Yehuda Amichai, Marcus Argentarius, W.H. Auden, Coleman Barks, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Bradstreet, Emily Bronte, Robert Burns, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, David Campbell, Thomas Campion, Raymond Carver, Catullus, C.P. Cavafy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, David Constantine, E.E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, Michael Donaghy, John Donne, Carol Ann Duffy, Helen Dunmore, Paul Durcan, U.A. Fanthorpe, James Fenton, John Fuller, Tess Gallagher, Jack Gilbert, Dana Gioia, Nikki Giovanni, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, Seamus Heaney, Robert Herrick, Rita Ann Higgins, Selima Hill, Jane Hirshfield, Elizabeth Jennings, Jackie Kay, John Keats, Galway Kinnell, D.H. Lawrence, Audre Lorde, James McAuley, Norman MacCaig, Louis MacNeice, Christopher Marlowe, Andrew Marvell, Michelangelo, Thomas Moore, Edwin Muir, Pablo Neruda, Grace Nichols, Sharon Olds, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Oswald, Ovid, Petronius, Marge Piercy, Alberto Rios, Christina Rossetti, Muriel Rukeyser, Rumi, Sappho, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jo Shapcott, Sir Philip Sidney, Stevie Smith, William Jay Smith, Edward Thomas, Fyodor Tyutchev and W.B. Yeats.