BBC Books have simplified the search--not just for love's young things, but for star-crossed lovers and those who have loved and lost. You're bound to find whatever you're looking for in The Nation's Favourite Love Poems. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" is the one most of us reach for: Elizabeth Barrett Browning romped home in pole position in The Bookworm's 1997 poll to find the nation's most popular love poems. Shakespeare, obviously, fared well, taking fifth and seventh positions with Sonnets 116 and 18 respectively. And Yeats, Auden, Burns and Marvell are way up there too. Although Christina G. Rossetti and Alice Meynell are the only female representatives in the Top Ten, women poets figure rather more prolifically in the book at large. Alongside the greats, Sylvia Plath with "You're" (albeit an odd choice), Emily Dickinson and Bront&235;, there are lighter moments too, thanks to Dorothy Parker and the modern triumvirate, Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy and Jenny Joseph who know how to drown their sorrows in style (helped by a packet of fags and a bottle of gin).

Traditionalists are more than adequately served with the likes of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelley, Blake and Byron. Entries from Edmund Spenser, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and John Donne--with a record nine entries!--prove that love, and the poetry of love, transcends time itself.

For lovers in every corner of the kingdom, this is a book to treasure! Keep it close to hand, for, at every page, there's a line for the moment. Love hurts, but we can all draw comfort from the words of Adrian Mitchell:

When I am sad and weary When I think all hope has gone, When I walk along High Holborn I think of you with nothing on

--Carey Green