Sixty Sonnets

by Hilbert, Ernest

• ISBN13: 9781597093613
• ISBN10: 1597093610
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-02-15
• Publisher: Red Hen Pr

Summary

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, Sixty Sonnets contain memories of violence, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate livesfailed novelists, forgotten literary critics, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems, satires, elegies, and songs of sorrow. Speaking at times in propria persona ("We'll head out, you and me, have a pint"), at times in the voice of both male and female characters ("I'm sorry I left you that day at MoMA"), or across historical gulfs ("Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone"), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing "the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored."

Author Biography

Ernest Hilbert is the editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review. He was educated at Oxford University, where he studied with Jon Stallworthy and James Fenton. While there, he edited the Oxford Quarterly. He later became the poetry editor for Random House’s magazine Bold Type in New York City and edited the web and print magazine nowCulture for several years. He reviews books for the New York Sun and the Academy of American Poets, and his poetry has appeared in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, and The American Scholar. He hosts a weekly web TV show called E-Verse Radio and composes libretti and song texts for the composer Daniel Felsenfeld. He also works as an antiquarian book dealer and lives in Philadelphia with his wife, a classical archaeologist.