The Shadow Sonnets

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.