Illennium

John Goodby's sequence of sixty-seven sonnets read as a tribute to Ted Berrigan (1934-1983), the author of the masterly The Sonnets(1964), updated and transplanted from New York City to South Wales. Irreverent and at times shamelessly erotic, Goodby adopts Berrigan's unique collage style in these poems, repeating and refiguring lines of the ongoing work so that unexpected shifts in meaning occur in each new context, generating a kind of Fast Show meets Jules Laforgue effect. In these poems 'the existence of long-lasting emotions is something of a puzzle' as we enjoy mysterious encounters with film nut Nigel and Harry H Corbett in Carmarthen's Latin Quarter and are exhorted repeatedly to accept that 'love is a babe'. If I ever write a poem this raw I'll be amazed.