Sonnets of various sizes

Peter Oswald (author)

In a letter, Hopkins wrote that the English sonnet is too short, because Italian vowels are longer than English vowels, and the Italian is the original and perfect sonnet. So in this collection you will find one extended sonnet – Les Murray wrote that an example of ‘sprawl’ (which is something he approves of) is a sonnet in its twenty-first line. You will also find some sonnets from the Italian of Dante, crammed into tight English vowels. Some sonnets that don’t rhyme. Some in the rhyming-couplet form of John Clare. And some poems of fourteen lines which are probably not sonnets at all.

Peter Oswald is a poet, playwright and performer. He was Writer-in-Residence at Shakespeare's Globe from 1998 to 2009. His plays, in verse, have been performed there, at the National Theatre, in the West End, on Broadway and around the world, and have been translated into various languages. The production of his version of Schiller's Mary Stuart received the South Bank Award. He co-founded The Abyss Theatre Company in 2002, with whom he works as writer and actor. He performs long story-poems based on Icelandic sagas and folktales, at theatres and festivals; in 2015 he did so at the Folger Theatre in Washington DC, the Hay Festival and Wells Festival. He has published a joint book of poems, Dyad, with Sean Borodale, and joint pamphlets with wife Alice, with whom he often performs. He lives with her and their three children in Devon. He received a Society of Authors travelling scholarship in 2016.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Shearsman Books (11 Oct. 2016)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 72 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 9781848614925
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 0.43 x 21.59 cm