As with other Italian imports, such as olives and spaghetti, I sometimes feel have an endless appetite for sonnets. So another anthology is always welcome, and this week I’ve been reading Paul Muldoon’s Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets (Faber, 2025). It’s an enjoyable buffet of small plates; one discovery I was glad to make was “The Shepherd Boy” by John Clare, which, like many sonnets, seems to tell a story about its own playful ability to imagine riches in a confined space (the book’s title comes from Wordsworth: “‘twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”):
As with most poetic miscellanies, closer inspection reveals some scantiness in the table of contents. For a writer whose own inventively pararhymed sonnets have been so influential on contemporary poetry, Muldoon is surprisingly uninterested in the range of modern experiment with the possibilities of the fourteen-liner out there, and surprisingly keen on nineteenth-century poets with only a minor claim to significance in sonnet history. Robert Browning, for example, was not a notable sonnet writer — unlike his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning — yet not only does he get in with a sort-of-sonnet comprising two seven-line stanzas, but also features in two other tributes: Swinburne’s “A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning” and Landor’s “To Robert Browning”. For this week’s post, then, I thought I’d pick seven sonnets passed over by Muldoon, which would be in my own imaginary anthology.
Muldoon’s introduction quotes the perceptive observation by Michael Theune that
Formally, virtually every sonnet is, at least in part, a concrete poem that looks like a sonnet.
The shape and spacing of a sonnet on the page, that is, tells you something about it before you’ve read a word. Scanty Plot of Ground doesn’t include any actual concrete sonnets, though, so I’m going to begin with my favourite, which is also the frontispiece to Jeff Hilson’s excellent anthology of innovative lyricism, The Reality Street Book of the Sonnet (2008). Bob Cobbing’s “Sunnet” is a visual pun on the classical division of the sonnet’s fourteen lines into 8/6, with the division marking the volta — or turn — of the poem’s thought, as it descends below the horizon like a sunset:
Given the many Victorian poets in Muldoon’s anthology, it’s a shame that he doesn’t include anything by their American contemporary Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821—1873), whose best sonnets are uniquely impressionistic and dream-like. In this one, the unsettled rhyme scheme (e.g. the delay between brink / drink and think) works powerfully to enhance the sense of a haunting memory returned to:
Another American original not found in Scanty Plot of Ground is Bernadette Mayer, whose sonnet “You jerk you didn’t call me up” (1968) is a scathing address to an insufficiently passionate man, complete with choose-your-own-adventure couplet:
Edwin Morgan’s Sonnets from Scotland (1984) is a sequence that uses fourteen lines to compress grand narratives into vivid miniatures of history. Here, I like how the volta reveals the post-glacial landscape as we know it (“fields like a world first seen”), but the couplet then reminds us of the earlier world of fire and ice that lies beneath:
Mimi Khalvati is a poet who seems to have settled into the sonnet as a form that suits the telling of stories across time and space. I admire the softly-linked rhyming of this poem from Afterwardness (2019), which brings us gradually round to Boris Johnson — who opportunistically backed the Brexit campaign, with its bogusly pro-NHS and anti-Turkish-immigration rhetoric — and the “swirling chain” of his family history:
One of the best book-length sonnet sequences of the last decade is Vidyan Ravinthiran’s The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019), made up of one hundred poems written for the poet’s wife. They are free in form and ingenious in syntax. Here the rhyme scheme fades with the anger of the middle lines — the allusion is to a scene from In the Heat of the Night (1967) where Poitier confronts a white plantation owner — before recovering a rebalancing humour with the final, unlikely armour’s / pyjamas:
My final choice is Sophie Robinson’s “Sonnet 101” (2012). As far as I know the title does not mean the hundredth-and-first of a sequence; it’s a joke about the sonnet as a (love) poem you learn to write in a certain way. Shakespearean 4-4-4-2 shape aside, it doesn’t follow the rules at all, instead beginning with the non-rhyme “writing / writing”, and then embedding an internal couplet in the final line (speak of / leap off). You are also not supposed to say “the / necessary fucking for poetry”, but here we are:
NOTES
Another classic concrete sonnet — to which Cobbing’s smudgy “Sunnet” seems a kind of contrasting tribute — is Mary Ellen Solt’s diagrammatic “Moonshot Sonnet” (1964):
One reason I’ve been thinking about sonnets is that I’m preparing to try a new way of talking about them: five one-hour sessions across July, in which I chat with my friend Joe from the Book Hive in Norwich about how (not) to read a poem. It’s in-person only, but here are the details in case you live locally, or know someone who does!
https://www.thebookhive.co.uk/event/how-not-to-read-a-poem-season-ticket/
