The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, edited by Jeff Hilson, 360pp, £15. Reality Street Editions, 63 All Saints Street, Hastings, East Sussex TN34 3BN. www.realitystreet.co.uk

When we talk of a sonnet most of us usually have in mind fourteen rhyming lines of iambic pentameter. We think of a form which originated in Italy and which hasn’t changed much since it was imported into England by Spenser and Shakespeare. Wannabe poets are encouraged to practise writing such sonnets, however embarrassing the results may be, so that they can acquire a sense of ‘form’. We don’t really have in mind ‘modern’ when we think of ‘sonnet’. In reality, of course, the sonnet – or ‘little song’ in Italian - has undergone many changes since the first Sicilian sonnets (which did not rhyme, but instead used repeating words).

The Reality Street Book of Sonnets seeks to do justice to the great variety of what might be termed ‘post-modern’ sonnets, or those which fall outside the mainstream of poetry. And in its 360 or so pages it does so admirably, shedding a much-needed light on British and other English-speaking practionners of the form, who generally tend to be neglected in favour of their American counterparts. Alongside the likes of Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Clark Coolidge, Jackson Mac Low and Lyn Hejinian, we have, among others, Tom Raworth, John Welch, Geraldine Monk, Tony Lopez and Michelle Leggott, revealing the rich exchange that has taken place between poetries of different countries over the last forty years. There is an excellent introduction to the work by Jeff Hilson, which documents the fortunes of the sonnet over the twentieth century.

The anthology begins with the American, Edwin Denby, a poet whose importance is now being more widely recognised. Many of Denby’s sonnets do in fact rhyme or use slant rhyme, in a playful way that recreates the atmosphere of New York:

In the street young men play ball, else in fresh shirts

Expect a girl, bums sit quietly soused in house-doors,

Girls in dresses walk looking ahead, a car starts

As the light clicks, and Greeks laugh in cafes upstairs.

(From ‘People on Sunday’.)

So far, nothing too radical in these first few pages. But then right after Denby, we have Bern Porter’s sound sonnet - ‘for an Elizabethan virgin’ -  followed by Mary Ellen Solt’s found, ‘silent’ poem, ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’. The latter consists of fourteen lines of symbols used by scientists on 1964 photographs of the moon to mark off areas of its surface. For some reason, these shapes – which have no sound we can articulate - have a strange poignancy in the way they seem to be connected, as the note below the poem puts it,  ‘not only with the moon’s new scientific status but with its timeless mystical silence’. Which may sound a little pretentious, but feels right if you spend just a few moments looking at the poem. One might ask, ‘Why is this a sonnet just because it has fourteen rows of symbols?’ But then we might also ask, ‘Why is this NOT a sonnet, given the way the sonnet has undergone so many changes in different countries over the centuries?’ At the very least, a piece such as this which crosses the border between visual art and literature, can open our minds to the possibility of the form of the sonnet. Ultimately, perhaps, it doesn’t really matter whether we call it a sonnet or not.

In any case, there is plenty in this chunky anthology for different tastes. It is a book I love to go back to and open pages at random. If I’m not quite in the mood for what I see (e.g. Jackson Mac Low), I’ll make a mental note to return there at a later time, and flick through the pages until I find something I’m more open to. Some work I enjoy coming back to again and again, for example, are Tony Lopez’s shocking, subversively funny collages:

Cartoon prawns and crabs go into Eurotunnel

Singing along with zydeco music. Redwoods fall.

It was a teacher bound and gagged a four-year-old boy

With sticky tape labelled Nastro Adesivo: 3M

Holding back the late works to keep up the selling price.

Can you design a machine that turns coffee

Into urine? That daydreams of oral sex?

                                              (From ‘Assembly Point D’.)

In different satirical vein, there is the work of Ken Edwards, with its rich wordplay:

The poets gather. They, like poetry itself,

want to be, not seem. Which is seemly.

These are their stories, and the summation

of them is this: that they reject story.

Why they are paralytic with joy: on their plastic chairs

they identify the depth of field of such paradoxes

                                               (From ‘THE POETS GATHER’.)

For something more lyrical (some might say ‘post-lyrical’), I might go to these lines of Michelle Leggot:

you and I have some walking to do, some

stitching together of the story so far, its feat

of silence, of sleeping lightly and listening

for the touch that outstrips all sense

                                                  (From ‘Blue Irises, 3’.)

This is a collection which not only reveals the potential of the sonnet and challenges its frontiers, but is also a huge pleasure to read. Not everything will appeal to everybody, it is true, but this can surely be said of any anthology. If you’re interested, don’t miss out. Get hold of a copy.