 The
Shadow Sonnets
AUTHOR: Richard Sommer ISBN: 0921833172
In this new collection, Richard Sommer shadows the Shakespearean sonnet, taking the most traditional form for expressing love and expanding its range and message to reflect our times. Sommer's sonnets create a strange music, with rhymes that are often proximate rather than identical. They are shadows, too, of the spirit of the sonnet, of its ever present thread of argument, its dense and gnarled sense of intimate conversation or panicked declaration, its erotic unrest, its terrible desire for someone and something unpossessed and not to be possessed. Sommer extends the sonnet beyond its traditional territory of love between man and woman to embrace the natural world around him and the deteriorating ecology of the planet. The result is a rich weave of past and present, love and pain, language and world.
REVIEWS: "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
"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
"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
"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 Other
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