101 Sonnets

An impressive range of subject in this framework of 14 lines.

I was seduced into buying this delicious little book by Eileen Shaw's review - she helpfully gives a full example of one of the probably less well known sonnets, and then (in comments, in reply to a question,) gives anotherSo if you want examples of some pretty damn stunning sonnets which may not be in your existing poetry collections - read her review for a couple of tasty samples.The foreword to this collection is vivid and muscular, the least dry explanation of the evolution of the sonnet out there. Paterson's own visceral response to poetry is palpable and infectious.The sonnets are ordered not by alphabetical author progressions, or by date; instead there is almost the sense of each sonnet, leading onto the next as part of a larger ordering of themes, so that the subject matters of the poems slowly progress - sonnets devoted to sexual love and praise of the beloved, sonnets which are almost physically sensuous in their devotion to praising the divine (nice juxtapositions of sonnets lingeringly describing kissing the beloved, to the first poem in 'the divine' series, a sonnet by Wilfred Owen describing kissing the Cross. And on.This very subtle, personal but unexplained, un spelt out (by Paterson) ordering of the sonnets is itself a delight and revelation, so that one can have a very modern sonnet cheek by jowl with one of the very well known ones, and the progression of subject and neighbouring sonnets slightly change the way one reads the familiar sonnet - it becomes 'as though for the first time' once moreAs another reviewer also notes, the 5 or 6 line notes on each sonnet right at the end of the book are excellent and illuminating - but utterly unobtrusive. Paterson trusts the sonnets, and the reader's personal experience of those sonnets properly, and does not forcefully insert his own interpretation of them onto yours. You have your own relationship with each poem, and can then choose to see, not a dissection of the poem, but the recounting of someone else's experience of it. He doesn't break the lovely thing apart, he leaves it whole, but maybe encourages the reader to look afresh or through different eyes.

If you love poetry you will adore this book. It begins with an introduction which explains the sonnet form as being fourteen lines - the optimum at which human attention is easily held, and also goes into some of the forms varied incarnations and history. But a poem can be a sonnet with thirteen lines too - perfectly properly. Poetry is extremely flexible as it has had to be in order to service human nature. These damned poets can scarcely make their minds up about anything to do with definition. But it doesn't matter. Opening with Robert Frost's The Silken Tent, which is perhaps sublime and delicate beyond any other poem here, this collection has a large number of other delights. The thing with poetry is that you cannot get enough, once hooked. There are the usual suspects: Wordsworth's The world is too much with us, John Donne's Batter my heart three-personed God, William Blake's To the evening star, and Carol Ann Duffy's Prayer along with Simon Armitage's Poem, and W B Yeats' Leda and the Swan. Here is one I hadn't come across before and especially loved, by Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labour in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house. Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?

Poetry has been to me somewhat of a closed art form, as I have always felt I didn't really "get" poems. But in 2011, luckily, I attended several poetry events at the Edinburgh Book Festival, with writers such as Don Paterson, not to mention Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, and Ben Okri. Poetry as performance art. Then I booked in to a Scottish Poetry Library course on poetry...and I found that not only could I read poetry aloud, I could even contribute to the discussion! I learned that intellectual understanding of poems is only one aspect, and arguably not the most important one. This collection of sonnets was brought to our attention on the course. It was first put together in 1999 by Don Paterson and recently re-issued in paperback. 101 sonnets by 101 poets from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Don Paterson, among many other strings to his bow, is Professor of Poetry at St Andrews University. The book entranced me from the first words of the Introduction, explaining what a sonnet is and what it is not, with humour and some irreverence, much like his speaking style. To quote from near the beginning of the Introduction: "statistical studies tell us that, for example, 'in a random sample of 7,000 sonnets, 32 per cent had the ABBAABBA CDCDCD rhyme scheme. It might be more useful if they said 'In a random sample of 7,000 sonnets, 6,878 were found to be terrible'. And the Introduction ends with "Poets write sonnets because it makes poems easier to write. Readers read them because it makes their lives easier to bear". This reader is very much enjoying finding poems that sing to me, and there are many in this book. Highly recommended.