This book, Petrarch's Songbook, is a bilingual edition of the songs and sonnets, originally titled Canzoniere, of Francesco Petrarch - a 14th-century Italian. It consists of 365 poems, mainly "Petrarchan" or Italian sonnets. In this edition, the original Italian poems appear side-by-side with an excellent verse translation by James Wyatt Cook. This is one of my favorite translations of the poems; Mark Musa's is more prosaic, Morris Bishop's is good, but hard to find.

If you want to find out what an obsessive love is truly like - here's the place to go. Petrarch fell in love with Laura on April 6, 1327 and obsesses about her for about fifty years. She was a married woman, living in the Avignon of the Popes. Her death, of the plague on April 6 (note the coincidence), 1348 did not end the fountain of poetry; Petrarch continued with the poems after her death.

This songbook is the source of the famed Petrarchan conceit, the farfetched comparison - for instance, that the beloved's eyes are like suns, dispensing warmth upon the lover (or cold when she is chilly). Later, the Elizabethan poets imitated these conceits. Even Shakespeare has a go at satirizing them.

Enjoy this fabulous poetry.