The Penguin Book of Women Poets

Spanning 3,500 years and forty literary traditions, this volume brings forth a rich and varied body of work by women poets, some familiar to the English-speaking reader, but many others long neglected or virtually unknown outside their respective countries. An introductory note on each poet tells something of her life and of the historical and literary context in which she wrote. The poems themselves–approximately four hundred in number and translated from languages as diverse as Byzantine Greek, Sanskrit, Old French, Hindi, Gaelic, Vietnamese, and Maori–cut across the barriers of time and culture to take their rightful place among the wealth of the world’s literature.