[New-Poetry] sent

[Anny Ballardini]

by Barry Schwabsky to the Buffalo:

'd like to point out the current issue of the London Review of Books contains--along with a wild and witty poem by our own Wystan Curnow--an unusually good essay on Sharkespeare's sonnets, by Barbara Everett (whose writing I had not previously been aware of). Unfortunately it is only available online to subscribers but it is worth seeking out the print edition. "These poems are both anonymous and individual.They are both easy and difficult.... The Sonnets seek to move through and beyond the whole utilitarianism of the Tudor ethos, the concept of goodness as use, as profit, which unites the Elizabethan farmyard to the guild and the court: to find an innate metaphysic in human love itself...Such stability as these poems achieve depends on a voice, and the partial animation of an always peripheral fiction: more precisely, on the depth of interior feeling with which that fiction of relationship takes on life, is proved true. But that 'truth' is as hard
 to analyse as it is original. Led to read the story as autobiography, we search in vain for dependable data. Unlike other sonneteers, Shakespeare nowhere names his beloved, except just conceivably in the early and punning 145, which may name Hathaway ('"I hate" from hate away she threw'). Comparably, the poet evokes the passing of time brilliantly, and yet gives not a single hint of a date in the whole sequence....The sonnets are beginning to be intense love poems; by 'love' they mean the tired horse trudging on and groaning at the goad, actors forgetting their lines, death-bells ringing in the churches of the City, stone lions and sea waves, poisons and medicines, ruined chapels and winter trees, music being played by a loved and hated woman, obsession and infidelity and tenderness and time always passing. And because the medium and only centre is the experiencing self, they relate love also to the hand writing and the eye reading."



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Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! 
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