Songs and Sonnets

Larry Beckett’s long-awaited first book, Songs and Sonnets, was written over a 26-year period. His blank verse sonnets and madrigals center on marriage in our time; these poems trace love day-to-day, with music and intensity. The man speaking and the woman addressed are the same, but the time and place keep mysteriously shifting. The whole sonnet tradition, from Petrarch and Wyatt to Montale and Lowell, was influential. These poems use strands of iterative imagery, as developed by Shakespeare, to make diffused metaphors. The hardbound edition contains a CD of a live performance, which premiered the first thirty-two sonnets.