Scanty Plot of Ground
A Book of Sonnets
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In the introduction to his selection of some of the greatest sonnets ever written, Paul Muldoon reminds us that 'of the innumerable traditional verse forms, the sonnet is not only the most persistent but also the most pervasive.' He suggests that 'part of the reason for the durability of the sonnet is its very duration.' It's the perfect length for what Dante Gabriel Rossetti described as 'a moment's monument,' or Edna St. Vincent Millay as putting 'chaos into fourteen lines.' Among the diverting and diverse poets represented here are Elizabeth Bishop, Wanda Coleman, John Donne, Terrance Hayes, John Keats, Claude McKay, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, Patricia Smith, William Wordsworth, and W.B. Yeats. There are also translations by Paul Muldoon of sonnets by Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Cesar Vallejo, as well as the doughty duo of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Muldoon's well-selected anthology of sonnets takes its title from a line in Wordsworth's "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room," in which he writes of "the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground." Confinement, Muldoon notes, is one of the aspects that unites the history of the sonnet, that "most persistent but also the most pervasive" of forms, as he writes in his witty and illuminating introduction. He is insightful on the ways African American poets have worked with and expanded the sonnet's boundaries, noting that poets such as Wanda Coleman and Terrance Hayes have "evoked the boundedness of the sonnet not so much to assert national or cultural belonging, as to trouble the limitations such concepts imply." This is borne out by the defiant assertion in Claude McKay's "If We Must Die": "Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/ Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!" Muldoon draws out other tropes and traditions that prove to be useful and indicative guides through this democratic anthology, which is arranged alphabetically instead of chronologically to highlight the universality of the form's possibilities and mix of chaos and control. It's a welcome primer on an always relevant poetic form.
