Although these tips come poetry flavoured, I profess that they’re just as relevant to the construction of prose (at least the poetically minded or literary stock).

Writing about love is writing about wildness, lassoing your own delightful delusions and applying a candy coating or a cheesy crust. It’s us at our most extreme, vulnerable, and hyper-emotional. Us drunk on emotion. Us passing off smut as sentiment. Or not.

I love the atypical love poem even more than those about romantic love. Love is larger than rom-coms and greeting cards would have us believe. In the land of the lilted, the atypical love poem reigns supreme — e.g. a love poem to a friend, to a pet, to ourselves; a love poem that lambasts the very notion of romantic loving.

For my five tips, I’m unfurling before you five of my favourite love poems. Poems I would attest have a quirk, twist, unusual plot or unique perspective to them. A little cheeky, but there you have it.

Hera Lindsay Bird — Ways of Making Love

In this masterclass of savvy similes and a quirky metaphors, Hera drops a veil of silliness over lovemaking. All the preposterousness and oddness of it all. The act, the ritual, the sticky bits. Follow her train of thought and see what bizarre realms it takes you to.

Ocean Vuong — Ode to Masturbation

A poem about self-love that starts a bit like an ars poetica and only to become a rallying call for tenderness. This takes something that could be vulgar or shameful or childish and makes it astoundingly beautiful.

Andrew McMillan — A Gift

How wonderful to find a poem to the ex-lovers, the ones that got away, or never got the chance, the ones you forget, or who forget you. The love’s abandoned. What ghastly splendour can be found by scavenging into your own murky past?

Carol Ann Duffy — Valentine

Some mordant and fierce insights into the quiddity of an onion become a wayward road-map to love, heartbreak and expectation. For all the lovers of curios and talisman.

Edwin Morgan — Strawberries & One Cigarette & A View of Things

There’s such a slew of brilliance to be found in the love poetry of Edwin Morgan that I couldn’t contain myself to just one picking. The structure of this final piece in particular is an ace one to use for writing exercises. You’ll see what I mean when you read it.