Inventing Love
A Sonnet Sequence
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
I INVENTING LOVE Why do I send you books you do not read? Write Emails that elicit no reply? Lay siege to you with borrowed words? Indeed, Why do I care at all?--except that I Can find no other ear for my complaint, No other fuel to feed a dying fire Than that which fed it once without restraint; No voice but what is now a distant choir, Till I must think perhaps that you are right, That I've invented love that is not there To light the growing darkness of this night, And fortify myself against despair. Yet if your hard analysis is true That fabled love sustains me, still it's you.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
They met when both were young and she already married, with waist-long, gold-red hair that called instantly to mind Sappho’s “girl with hair like a falling flame.”
Now, nearly half a century later, award-winning poet Frank Salvidio has gathered together the sonnets addressed to her, some previously published in journals and anthologies, and fashioned them into a sonnet sequence which chronicles their enigmatic, mutual attraction, which dates from that first meeting.
Whether it is, as she suggests, a love invented to provide a poet with a theme, or the fatal attraction which his poetry expresses, these sonnets trace its history from the point of view of someone who still does not know if it is real or illusory; and their arrangement recreates this quixotic relationship in all its ambiguity, from the closing couplet of the title sonnet,
“Yet if your hard analysis is true
That fabled love sustains me, still it’s you,”
to the conclusion of the last, which defines it as“………………..a play within
A play of ifs and buts, of would and should,
A world not realized, not understood.”
About the Author
In addition to the sonnets and other poems which have appeared in journals and anthologies, Frank Salvidio is also the author of Between Troy & Florence (original poems and translations) and translations of Dante (Inferno, Vita Nuova) and Sappho of Lesbos (Sappho Says). He lives in West Springfield, MA.