The Gardening Fires: Sonnets and Fragments Jerome Luc Martin Author

Poetry. A sonnet sequence set among the pines and inlets of the Mediterranean coast, THE GARDENING FIRES—a finalist for the ninth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize—constitutes a remarkable debut collection. Each of its sonnets is followed by a fragment which simultaneously extends and deconstructs the original poem's language, theme, and music, the formal rigour of the one being balanced against the cascading incompleteness of the other.As susceptible to the moment of their composition as to the spur of their subject (the loss of love and its haunting persistence), the poems of THE GARDENING FIRES are rooted in a tradition stretching all the way back from Robert Lowell to Petrarch. They re-acquaint us with what carefully meditated, deeply felt, and lovingly crafted poetry can achieve.