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ABSTRACT:
EXTRACT:
John O'Leary, 'Salt', Seattle: Zenane Independent Media, 2003,
paper covers, 77 pp., ISBN 0-9716464-0-6,
'Salt' is the title of the latest book of poems by John O'Leary, the Irish-born alumnus of two Trinity Colleges (Cambridge and Dublin) and resident poet warrior/shaman and permanent professor at the Allihies Language and Arts Centre on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland, who has also been writer-in-residence and Professor of English at Seattle University and, most recently, Illinois Wesleyan University.
The love-sonnet sequence in Western literature is as old as Petrarch, and has Shakespeare as its most famous exponent. The genre flourished in nineteenth-century English literature, producing significant instances in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'The House of Life', Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese', and, if one stretches a point, 'Modern Love', George Meredith's sequence of fifty sixteen-line 'sonnets'. John O'Leary's 77 poems (all Roman-numbered, all untitled) obey the conventions of the genre by each having fourteen lines, but at the same time disobey them by rhyming occasionally rather than always, and by sporting a disconcertingly short line-length, averaging around one-half the traditional ten-syllable line. Brevity is the soul of O'Leary's wit, and his poems could almost be called haiku-sonnets.
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