The Planetary Tambourine

Ninety-Nine Sonnets
by Steven Nightingale

“In the music of the world: pulse of this dream—
Of talk, rivers, your heart: planetary tambourine.”

Maybe one in a lifetime do we witness the marriage of writer and form wrought as exquisitely as seen here between poet Steven Nightingale and his sonnets. Through this perfect partnership we travel along in the adventure of putting together a life in gorgeous, amorous language. In these sonnets, Nightingale creates a path to the miraculous by loving the practical and by transforming ordinary perceptions into transcendental ones.

The wildly heretical ideas in these poems—that we can make the world anew in ways that are essential, unpredictable, and life-giving, and that paradise is not a metaphor but a presence—are harbingers of a new-old voice in poetry: “When heaven is undressed, there is religion.”

These poems call us to possess new senses, just as in the introduction Nightingale speaks of the sonnet form calling the mind to new life. There are 99 sonnets here: a sacred tradition hold, “There are ninety-nine names of God, and whoever learns, understands, and recounts them enters into Paradise."

"Steven Nightingale proves once again that the sonnet, like rock ‘n’ roll, will never die."

— Billy Collins
Former U.S. Poet Laureate

Steven Nightingale’s collection of sonnets is finely wrought and full of light. Formally elegant, this book is testimony to a life richly lived. The sonnet, as Neruda has famously reminded us, is a little house. The ninety nine poems in “The Planetary Tambourine” are a fine addition to the tradition. Many of the poems are of marriage and familial love, transformative, healing, good.

— Mary O’Malley
Poet, author of five books

Steven Nightingale is the author of two novels, The Lost Coast and The Thirteenth Daughter of the Moon, and Cartwheels, a book of sonnets, published by the Black Rock Press. A native Nevadan, he received a B.A. at Stanford University where he studied computer science and literature. For the past three years he has been living in Granada, Spain, with his wife Lucy and daughter Gabriella.