A.E. Stallings writes that like the minutes of the hour, these Sixty Sonnets both combine to make a whole and shine as individual moments. While groups of these sonnets occasionally suggest a narrative refreshingly, like the fugitives and weary academics that people these pages they work alone. The newspaper crime blotter itself, from which, perhaps, some of these incidents are torn, speaks up as a single sonnet. Here are barflies, high-school dropouts, retired literary critics, washed-up novelists and war-zone reporters, suburbanites and historians, and lyrics with a range of reference from Zippos and Star Wars figures to William James and Thomas Eakins. Mostly in a decasyllabic line that allows for the roughed-up prose rhythms of speech, these sonnets tend to conclude in true iambic pentameter, the tradition that haunts rather than dominates these poems. It is the voice of a less lyrical Prufrock ( We ll head out, you and me, have a pint ), a voice that speaks with unsentimental affection for the failures, the Gentlemen at the Tavern but it is a voice that just as easily could be speaking of the gentlemen at the Mermaid Tavern, and indeed there is something of Marlowe, as well as Eliot, in this sensibility. The evasive presence in the background occasionally speaks in propria persona the wry, worldly-wise voice of the poet himself as much listener as talker something like a sympathetic bartender, scrupulous in his measures, who has heard it all before, but nightly observes every hour unfold afresh from behind the counter. "

60 Sonnets 'Original' And 'Streamlined' respects poetic traditions. The main feature of the collection, an aggregation of 120 Shakespearean sonnets, may be a recurring movement in favor of rigor that has no punctilious formal traditionality. Whatever subject matter might be seen in various examples, many of the sonnets might seem gripping; however, the entire secret of 60 Sonnets 'Original' And 'Streamlined' probably ends up being in the strict form of the Shakespearean sonnet itself as that basic structure repeatedly is 'honored and obeyed' at least in terms of rhyme pattern, meter, and the requisite number of lines. Here are the opening stanzas of "CLXXIX" and "179" Though newer ways to film and televise the subtle shadings of reality may long enhance the lives of human eyes, man still will scarcely have the power to see. That film & better television could be giving the entire great human race a clearer sense that nature may be good is no real proof that humans can have grace. The book's main thrust is highly linguistic--highly grammatical--in that the derivative (the 'streamlined') versions may tend to have veneers that seem otherworldly.