Review of The Shadow Sonnets
“Richard Sommer is the latest in a long line of poets, mostly men, who have been seduced by the sonnet form, that wonderful controlled burning that embraces whimsy, reflection, nostalgia, work-play, and a host of other discrete connections with daily life. He nabs in the cage of form 'loving presences' of grandmother, a daughter caught between the waiting school bus and a father's goodbye hug, poachers, politicians, animals, old amours; but the capture is brief, playful, like the tight embrace that renders joyful our release. At their best, these sonnets give us old truths in a new form: 'our lives and death rise to poise and are over.' One says to the form itself what Sommer says to his beloved: 'Ah, you take me in again after all those years.'”
More Reviews of this title
“How pleasing strange to come across a book of sonnets in the late 20th century. In a time when the form is generally derided as at best nostalgic or at worst politically reactionary, I was anxious to explore this unusual text. Written in a loose version of the 14-line Shakespearean sonnet, Sommer's Shadow Sonnets are less a sequence in the classical sense than fragments of perception that create not a linear narrative but a whole that resists framing As in the best sonnet sequences of the past the autobiographical element in Sommer's work is a major component defining voice and perspective.”