Eating and drinking and the rituals that go with them are at least as important as loving in most peoples lives, yet for every hundred anthologies of poems about love, hardly one is devoted to the pleasures of the table. Poems of Food and Drink abundantly fills the gap. All kinds of foods and beverages are laid out in these pages, along with picnics and banquets, intimate suppers and quiet dinners, noisy parties and public celebrations in poems by Horace, Catullus, Hafiz, Rumi, Rilke, Moore, Nabokov, Updike, Mandelstam, Stevens, and many others. From Sylvia Plaths ecstatic vision of juice-laden berries in Blackberrying to D. H. Lawrences lush celebration of Figs, from the civilized comfort of Noel Cowards Something on a Tray to the salacious provocation of Swifts Oysters, from Li Po on Drinking Alone to Baudelaire on The Soul of the Wine, and from Emily Dickinsons Forbidden Fruit to Elizabeth Bishops A Miracle for Breakfast, Poems of Food and Drink serves up a tantalizing and variegated literary feast.