Borges & Other Sonnets

9781931112338

1931112339

"Borges" and Other Sonnets will come to be identified as one of the spearhead books of the new literary movement being fostered by the American sonnet. William Baer's keen sense of history and popular culture gives his vernacular style an authority that excites as it interests. His wide range of themes accommodates sonnet sequences, as well as individual sonnets of striking episodic force. The sonnet, as we know, rewards technique, and Baer's lyrical deftness handles the "argument" of sonnetry and the "grammar" of its structure with assured control, and a complete absence of routundity, that great sin of all fixed forms. Even the variety of his pieces is clearly in the grand tradition, as a look at some of the titles will show: "Adam," "Job," "Crime Scene," "Pumpkin," "Secret Police," "Snowflake," and so on. William Baer has given us a collection of fifty-five sonnets that succeeds in being urgent, amusing, instructive, and moving -- a heady mix. Book jacket.