The Gardening Fires: Sonnets and Fragments

Poetry. A sonnet sequence set among the pines and inlets of the Mediterranean coast, THE GARDENING FIRES—a finalist for the ninth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize—constitutes a remarkable debut collection. Each of its sonnets is followed by a fragment which simultaneously extends and deconstructs the original poem's language, theme, and music, the formal rigour of the one being balanced against the cascading incompleteness of the other.

As susceptible to the moment of their composition as to the s...