Makes You Stop and Think: Sonnets - Softcover

"The sonnet. is a sacred / vessel, it takes a civilization / to conceive its shape or know / its uses," the poet Louise Bogan told "a crowd of bearded youths" and "rumpled girls." Hoffman's harvest of half a century's sonnets shows the richness and power of their form. These poems revel in exploring memory and feeling:

      For reality is vintage and delicious
      Especially when you taste it while it brews
      Because it comes as love comes, heart-skip sudden,
      Yet long as a lifetime in a once past wishes,
      A gift you couldn't have the wit to choose.

Daniel Hoffman was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1973-74. His first book of poems, An Armada of Thirty Whales, was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1954. Among the numerous collections that followed are Brotherly Love, a National Book Award finalist, Darkening Water, and Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems, 1948-2003. He has been awarded the 2003 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, given by the Sewanee Review. He lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania and Cape Rosier, Maine.