Makes You Stop and Think: Sonnets

The sonnet… is a sacred / vessel, it takes a civilization / to conceive its shape or know / its uses, the poet Louise Bogan told a crowd of bearded youths and rumpled girls. Hoffman’s harvest of half a century’s sonnets shows the richness and power of their form. These poems revel in exploring memory and feeling:

For reality is vintage and delicious
Especially when you taste it while it brews
Because it comes as love comes, heart-skip sudden,

Yet long as a lifetime in a once past wishes,

A gift you couldn’t have the wit to choose.