Vertebrae Rosaries: 50 Sonnets
Vertebrae Rosaries: 50 Sonnets
$15.00
Philip Dacey
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Vertebrae Rosaries: 50 Sonnets is Philip Dacey's tenth full-length collection of poems.
“I remember, thirtysome years ago, when Dacey first published a couple of poems in traditional forms, thinking, Phil, Phil, what are you doing? That’s how out of fashion the old forms had fallen. Before long, he had co-edited with David Jauss, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, which has proven one of the most popular and influential anthologies of the past three decades. And I can think of no living American poet who has mastered more forms from free verse to blank verse, from couplets to sonnets and beyond than Philip Dacey.”
Cover to Cover
She loves the times they read in bed together,
even the interruptions, a quote, a touch. The sound
of pages in motion, one passage after another.
She fiction, he history. Or poems, a bond.
Passion as prologue or epilogue, usually,
but this more intimate, the book a kind
of lover, who penetrates in such a way
that she opens all the more to him at her side.
Two lamps, and country night pressed close against
the skylight, a reader peering over a shoulder,
and the arrogantly illiterate stars for once
jealous, aware of the word but left out in the cold.
His left foot reads her right. The moment's ample,
their bookmarks sacred, fixtures in the temple.