Eating and drinking and the rituals that go with them are at least as important as loving in most people's lives, yet for every hundred anthologies of poems about love, hardly one is devoted to the pleasures of the table. Eat, Drink, and Be Merry 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 Plath's ecstatic vision of juice-laden berries in Blackberrying to D. H. Lawrence's lush celebration of Figs, from the civilized comfort of Noe l Coward's Something on a Tray to the salacious provocation of Swift's Oysters, from Li Po on Drinking Alone to Baudelaire on The Soul of the Wine, and from Emily Dickinson's Forbidden Fruit to Elizabeth Bishop's A Miracle for Breakfast, Eat, Drink, and Be Merry serves up a tantalizing and variegated literary feast.
