> Skip to content
  • Published: 31 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448104239
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

When Love Speaks

Poetry and prose for weddings, relationships and married life.




There are over 200,000 marriages and 7000 civil partnerships per year. This anthology offers over 100 poems and readings which celebrate love and union.

The perfect gift for Valentine’s Day

'And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with harmony'
Love's Labour's Lost, William Shakespeare

When Love Speaks brings together the greatest writing on love and commitment - from Donne to Cole Porter, Sappho to P.G. Wodehouse, love letters of the great composers to Edwardian marriage advice. These poems and passages capture high romance and everyday happiness, feverish first love and tender union. This joyful anthology provides a range of unique and inspiring readings for a wedding or civil ceremony.

Selected by the poet Adam O'Riordan

  • Published: 31 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448104239
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

About the author

Adam O'Riordan

Adam O'Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982, where he currently lives. In 2008 he became the youngest Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection In the Flesh (2010) win a Somerset Maugham Award. He is the Academic Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Also by Adam O'Riordan

See all

Praise for When Love Speaks

Far more, and better, than the routine Valentine's anthology...rings the bells for a garland that revives a stale genre

Boyd Tonkin, Independent

Life is nothing without literature, whether taken in snippets...or in satisfying chunks, like the contents of the new anthology When Love Speaks...plenty to choose from in this collection

Bel Mooney, Daily Mail

O'Riordan's fresh eyes have turned up some beautiful bits of writing

Dazed and Confused

The collected poems and prose extracts successfully fulfill editor Adam O'Riordan's aim to capture 'some of the strangeness of the wedding day' and other aspects of our love lives.

Chrissie Manby, Time Out

The delicate introduction makes falling in love seem like the most sensible way to spend your time

Elle