The collection is split into six sections: Goddesses (which includes ‘Ode to Aphrodite’), Desire and Death-longing, Her Girls and Family, Troy, Maidens and Marriages, and The Wisdom of Sappho.

I love Sappho’s poetry and I have never found a translation that I dislike. She is also well known as a symbol of love and desire between women, with the English word ‘Sapphic’ being derived from her name, and her poetry is often read as homoerotic. The only poem to have survived in its entirety is ‘Ode to Aphrodite’, which is featured in this collection. Most of Sappho’s poetry is now lost which leads to collections such as this one, which bring together the remaining fragments of her poetry. Sappho was a prolific poet in her own time and was given names such as the “Tenth Muse” and “The Poetess”. She is known for her lyric poetry which was written to be sung while accompanied by a lyre. 570 BC) was an Archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos. This is a new translation of her surviving poetry.

The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry–among them poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation and remembrance–that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. Summary: More or less 150 years after Homer’s Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey. Title: Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments

Sappho poems and fragments