The Honey Gatherers: a book of love poems, by edited by Maura Dooley

Getting down to the heart of the matter

"I'm scared of my own heartbeat;/it's so loud someone might say/'who's on the drums?'" writes Jackie Kay. Liz Lochhead is disillusioned: "The whole Valentine's Day Thing is trivial and commercial." Edna St Vincent Millay has had enough: "Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,/ I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me..." But, three centuries earlier, Anne Bradstreet insisted: "If ever two were one, then surely we."

This anthology of more than 300 love poems offers more poems by women and modern writers (James Fenton features more often than Donne; there's no Burns or Browning) than the Penguin and Faber collections. But it's not about counting, it's about poems that, in Maura Dooley's phrase, "detonate a charge"; about CK Williams's "old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again, stamping in its stall".

The poems are ordered into sections that move from falling in love through marriage to break-up, but the pairings of poems within are more illuminating. Nessie Dunsmuir's The White Word – "set your word's orchard fair to find my ear" – poignantly precedes her husband WS Graham's "I leave this at your ear for when you wake". Emily Dickinson's Wild Nights is, amusingly, followed by Billy Collins's Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes.

Alistair Elliot's translations of Ronsard's sonnets appear alongside Yeats's When you are Old (partly founded on Ronsard) and Shakespeare's When forty winters shall besiege thy brow. Gwen Harwood's tender meditation on Wyatt follows his Forget not yet the tried intent, spanning four centuries. Other poems chime through subject matter: steamy rooms link Simon Armitage, Christopher Reid and Carol Ann Duffy.

From America, there's an extraordinary, sleazy poem that finds Edwin Denby contemplating his fellow underground passengers: "the fold at the crotch of a clothed human being:/ You'll want to nuzzle it, crop at it like a goat." His compatriot Anne Sexton brought a lump to the throat, as did Sharon Olds's True Love – so replete with familial happiness that she can only repeat: "I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it."

Love Calls Us to the Things of this World is the title of a poem by Richard Wilbur, and most of these poems explore much more than the person whom they address. Paul Muldoon's Long Finish weaves in and out of the Troubles: semi-automatics and land mines have to be contemplated alongside 10 years of marriage. Grace Nichols's Configurations cleverly combines the interaction of two cultures with love-making. There is even a love poem written by an intelligence officer, used as a code for transmitting secret wartime messages.

The Honey Gatherers brings into focus the origins of the term "lyric" as applied to poetry – so many of the poems evoke music and song, with refrains and choruses. There are madrigals, ballads, popular lyrics (Cole Porter, Bob Dylan), and blues poems (Kamau Brathwaite and Sonia Sanchez), some so rhythmical that you can't help reading them aloud. "Love and harmony combine,/ And around our souls entwine", wrote Blake in Song, In this musical anthology, they do just that.