The Shadow Sonnets

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

How pleasingly strange to come across a book of sonnets in the late 20th
century. In a time when form is generally derided as at best nostalgic
or at worst politically reactionary, I was anxious to explore this
unusual text. Written in a loose version of the 14-line Shakespearean
sonnet, Sommer’s Shadow Sonnets are less a sequence in the classical
sense than fragments of perception that create not a linear narrative
but a whole that resists framing. This blend of the traditional and the
new challenges the reader to read against the grain of expectations, as
exemplified by the opening, which fuses parodic Sidneyan invective with
American blues: “Give me a break, / muse, just let me live peaceful
for a while— / but now along comes Ray Charles.”

As much as I admire the daring objective of Sommer’s experiment, I am
troubled by his often retrograde slide into clichéd apprehensions,
especially of gender identity. In “Sonnett 66” he writes, “I have
been entered, as inlet by the sea, / as day by rain, by the woman
already in me.” I sense that this is supposed to be liberating; yet,
what it says to me is that Sommer accepts as natural the repressive
patriarchal binary of gender codification. In one particularly
disturbing poem, Sommer explores relations between men and women,
writing that “If ever you get her down / so she can’t move, you’ve
lost the real woman.” What is a “real woman” anyway? Such identity
reifications cannot but harm an otherwise worthwhile endeavor of
fostering understanding and compassion for ourselves and other humans.

As in the best sonnet sequences of the past, the autobiographical
element in Sommer’s work is a major component defining voice and
perspective. In the foreword he says “the poem’s shadows are my
shadows,” thereby pointing at the slippage between writer and
narrative voice. Had Sommer explored it further, this might have enabled
him to revel in Shakespearean metamorphosis and avoid the pitfalls of
imputing coherent identities where there are only social presences.