Shadow Words

This selection of "deformed sonnets" is part of a continuing cycle. The sonnets have been praised by Beckett's biographer Deirdre Bair ("poems to savor"), the composer William Osborne ("profound, honest, and beautiful"), the playwright Jay Jeff Jones "spare and simple as Chinese wisdom"), the historian Paul Buhle ("a message from the avant-garde past-never really past in our crumbling world-but as vivid as ever"). The radical author Supervert has called them "unimpeachable, thoughtful, imagistic ironic, clear as water; they make you feel contemplative when you read them." And the British literary critic and poet David Erdos regards them as "free sonnets of experience that even Blake himself would favour. They are tears for the tongue; to be savored once tasted, and like a drop for the eye, ear, or mind, they restore perception to its rightful place. They are dark diamonds."