Everyday treat, indulgent luxury or an addiction we can’t or won’t break – many of us have a passionate relationship with chocolate, making it perfect subject matter for poetry.

This luscious mini-anthology celebrates preferences for milk or plain, pralines or fondants, rich truffles or the sweetest hot chocolate drinks. Anyone who has ever craved chocolate will identify with poems that explore its sensuous aspects – taste, texture, mouthfeel – in an intensity akin to love.

And if chocolate is like love, then these poems explore the depth and shape of that love:

“Knotted smoke, dark punch
of earth and night and leaf,
for a taste of you

any woman would gladly
crumble to ruin.”

from ‘Chocolate’ by Rita Dove

These entertaining, unexpected and moving poems also explore the history of chocolate, and the price paid by those whose hard work brings it to our lips.

Poems by Clare Best, Alison Brackenbury, Barbara Crooker, Rita Dove, Roy Marshall, Ife Olatona, Pauline Prior-Pitt, Louis Simpson, Oenone Thomas and Noel Williams.