Review of The Shadow Sonnets

The Shadow Sonnets

These poems have a contemporary feel: the reader often forgets the constraints under which Sommer is working because he stretches the medium, bending the rules of metre and rhyme.


The Montreal Gazette

More Reviews of this title

The Shadow Sonnets

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.


Canadian Book Review Annual

The Shadow Sonnets

These sonnets are 'smoky songs' of love and sex and politics, felt acutely, oh like the ache of the jazz horn in the 'sinuosities of Mingus.' Hurt, memory, and cigarette smoulder in Sommer's music. In his muted stanzas you will hear 'talk, true talk' to save a mountain but also to sing the blues.


— Mary di Michele

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.'


— Gary Geddes

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