The Never-Not Sonnets: Poems
Barbara L. Greenberg. University Press of Florida, $12.95 (53pp) ISBN 978-0-8130-0939-1
These 14-line poems are sonnets in the loosest sense, written in the traditions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Berryman and Pablo Neruda. Greenberg ( The Spoils of August ) looks at love with an ironic, late 20th-century sensibility. In the first section the narrator and an unnamed man plot ``to spend our extreme old age together. She / would have left you by then; he would have predeceased me.'' In the second section the persona still addresses her lover as ``you'' but focuses on family and friends, past and present. After listing various sundering couples in ``Iris and Ron Are Divorcing,'' she comments, ``These rifts resound like thunder into my own marriage. / Iris and Ron especially; he and I stood up for them.'' But instead of wishing for divorce herself, she entreats: ``Dear one, if you love me, / stay true to her. As I'll to him. The loneliness / you and I assuage in each other has no home elsewhere.'' Some poems verge on the inconsequential, but collectively these pieces convey the rich admixture of everyday thoughts and feelings. (Aug.)
Details
Reviewed on: 01/01/1989
Genre: Fiction
Hardcover - 53 pages - 978-0-8130-0920-9