The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets

In a voice at once luminous and brooding, humorous and grave, Willis Barnstone offers an amazing sonnet sequence on his double life -- and distinguished career -- as a scholar and an artist. While translating the poetry of Borges in the mid-70s, he rediscovered the sonnet's dramatic "It was as if I had discovered the secret of flight, how to let myself go, with faith, fear, and all the forces I could summon up to intensify the clarity of the moment." Thus began what he calls his "eighteen-year drunk on the sonnet." These five histories are testimony to a hugely ranging vision informed by a keen awareness of the great sonnet tradition in English and in other languages. Sensations and experiences from a lifetime among many cultures on many continents inspire sometimes sparkling, sometimes somber, but always piercingly honest a tea commune in China, "the sky of awful smoke" at Auschwitz, a New York heat wave, a Tangier prostitute, the suicides of his father and brother, Greek seas and skies. The lyricism of the language, the antic humor, and the unblinking scrutiny of difficult questions through a fierce but loving lens make this collection more than the signature of a singular it represents a major revitalization of a dormant poetic form.