A collection of latter-day sonnets depicting the author's life as a lover and a newspaperman. The style is sometimes wry, sometimes lyrical; the tone ranges from comic to romantic to melancholy. The poems contain lovely echoes of John Berryman, Catullus, and Sappho, as well as the 17th Century Metaphysical poets. They are sometimes written in the voice of a persona.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
Like a modern Thales of Miletus, Kenton Wing Robinson buoys his poems with a primal conceit: water as the basis of all things. We are, after all, bodies of water, he writes, constant only in our inconstancy. Robinson revives the traditional sonnet form, removes its prissy constrictions and, in the process, evokes the spirits of Homer, Sappho, Catullus and many others in creating a world of deeply felt love, small-town journalism ( We are whores who deal in words ), the mundane (covering a parade in Plainville) and the morbidly tragic (reporting on a young girl s suicide). The Water Sonnets also offers a view of natural Connecticut you ve never seen before. It is, in a word, a delight. --John Surowiecki, author of The Hat City after Men Stopped Wearing Hats and winner of the Pegasus Award for Verse Drama --John Surowiecki, author of The Hat City after Men Stopped Wearing Hats and winner of the Pegasus Award for Verse Drama
About the Author
Kenton Wing Robinson takes his middle name from his grandmother's maiden name, as it was she who raised him, taught him to read and, when he was still a boy, introduced him to Thomas Carew, her favorite metaphysical poet. He has written poetry since he was nine years old, and he achieved his first recognition as a writer in the eighth grade, when his English teacher intercepted a poem alleging she had sex with hippopotami. He has written reams of poetry since, most of which have been stuffed into drawers to gather dust. Always a bridesmaid, Robinson has seen three of his collections Common Bird Songs, The Execution Club and What It s Made Of be finalists or honorable mentions in various contests. His poems have been published in AGNI, The Worcester Review, The Litchfield Review and a number of other magazines. An award-winning reporter and columnist at The Day in New London, Connecticut, Robinson has been a newsman for most of his life.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wit and hard-won wisdom,
By Shimita (New England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Water Sonnets (Paperback)
Friends recently invited me to attend a reading by this guy, and I was very impressed, to say the least. I bought his collection of sonnets. They are really good. They hold up to the closer scrutiny I was able to give them after the reading. This is a person who clearly has plenty to say, and it is hard won. There is nothing cheap here, no literary effects for the sake of literary effects. But that doesn't mean he isn't a literary craftsman. He stays wedded to the sonnet form here, and his poems, for all their originality, are recognizably in the broader poetic tradition. He writes extremely well-crafted, pointed and very witty sonnets about love, lust, drinking and the moral dilemmas of journalism, and sometimes he just has fun writing, very humorously, about literary figures such as Pepys and Hemingway. In one funny poem he imagines himself into the brain of a poodle who has to put up with a couple of irritating cats, but even in this poem his words take a beautiful flight into a different dimension. This is a keeper of a book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Marvelous,
By G. Elliot (New York, N.Y.) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Water Sonnets (Paperback)
I found Kenton Wing Robinson's "The Water Sonnets" almost by accident as I'm not ordinarily drawn to poetry. But there's something about his verse that intrigued and touched me. And his language lingers in me.
Many of Robinson's "sonnets" (he seems to play with the form) are drawn from his years as a journalist ("We are whores who deal in words"). Some are out of the ordinary - read of his lunch with a suspected serial killer, accused of biting his victims ("A compact, clammy man of tics, / an uneven & erratic grin to fit the broken / chain incised into their skins"). And some are about the ordinary, but, as with all gifted writers, his language makes you see the ordinary in a different way. Such as his marvelously humorous "Rhymes With," after which you'll never watch a TV weather report in the same way: All day the television shows us wind: Wind in Cuba, wind in Florida, wind in South Carolina. "Wind is coming! Wind!" television tells us. "Live! Wind!" And the downright hilarious "What I Said He Said They Said" - an almost burlesque account of an argument among a crowd of fishermen, a reporter, and a state environmental official! But there is much more to this slender but rich volume. There are dozens of love poems swimming with passion. Water images were never so sensual: "my thought raveling backward to / a winter river in the night, / when I, my lips to your lips of ice, / drank the heat from inside your mouth." And some poems, defying categorization, are just downright wonderful, such as (dare I say the metaphysical?) "Displacement," which opens with Churchill's parrot marking "his 104th hatchday in London. Sources say he's dumb in his dotage, no longer squawks `F--- Hitler' as Winston Churchill taught." Robinson's sonnets belong on the night tables of writers and lovers of language and just plain lovers! Enjoy!
5.0 out of 5 stars
the flow of form and substance,
By
This review is from: The Water Sonnets (Paperback)
The sonnet form in this collection becomes as fluid as water. Most of these poems are 14 lines, but beyond that we are treated to endless shape-shifting, from Elizabethan style to stripped down Haiku-like stanzas, fitting, as a major theme is the fluidity of things, of the self, of how we flow into each other, and, the marvel of it all, love that persists through all this change:
"How is it you still eddy through the low beds of me?" The love poems, grouped in the first and last of four groups, are exquisite. Poems in the "Newsman" group take an ironic hard look from the inside at the work of journalism (Robinson has been a newsman most of his life), what is said when it shouldn't be-- "If I were me I wouldn't talk to me" --what isn't or can't be said, or is displaced, such as a front page story about a man who "shoots her because she is beautiful... Meanwhile God buries a town in Turkey, because it is beautiful. 3 grafs. Page A23" Poetry proves to be an excellent medium in which to reveal things about journalism that journalism can't say about itself. The themes interpenetrate in delightfully unexpected ways, as in the lead poem, "Why does a blow upon the water create many waves?": "Begin: a kid paid 35¢ an inch for zoning commission news.... Begin: your kiss, a casual pebble plunked in the still pool of me.... Begin: again, I would starve on correspondent's pay to taste your lips." In the persona of the newsman he brings us inside the telling of hard stories, about pedophiles, serial killers, and suicide. In "It has nothing of its own but seizes hold on everything", interviewing the mother of one such: "I am the glass, sent to reflect her.... I am the sheath of ice upon December trees' bare arms." We see the newsman variously as a leftover snowbank, a transparent pond, a silent vessel, sweating. "Minor poet, major hack" he tells us. But this first book of poems, so finely crafted, rich in metaphor and play, and very accessible, is the fruit of decades of persistent working out of insistent images and honing of craft. There is so much more. Robinson has an eye and ear for animals, especially birds, and their distinctive characters, and they appear throughout, often in metamorphoses. Churchill's parrot (who "still bobs on his perch to music,/like the V cut by a stick/stuck in a river, his master's ghost's last flick/er") snatches from death a bit of life, and paired with this image is the old cat who loudly yearns for death in life. In "Parasols Lost", umbrellas assume the attitudes and colors of an egret, a flamingo and a crow, and mutely suggest and conceal the owners who lost or abandoned them. There is a Gila monster pursuing fame, a dog who reveals his previous lives, insolent cats, the cat in us. The mood of the poems varies from ironic to somber to hilarious (one, in the style of Catullus, about a coitus interrupted (or not!) by a phone call from the woman's husband). The wisdom owes much to the Greeks and Romans, with some Japanese currents, sounding Zen-like themes prominent among the ancient Greeks. In "Salt": "The sea moves through me, spills into you. I taste my salt upon your lips-- fifth element--without which world would end." The quintessence was the divine element, the stuff of the unmoved movers. Bringing it down to lowly salt, Robinson resists the dualism toward which much Western philosophy later bends. Everything is water. All things are one. But the enchantment lies in the multiform crystalizations such as are fashioned for us here.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
