Cinnamon Theologies
Ninety-Nine Sonnets
by Steven Nightingale

For poet Steven Nightingale, the sonnet is not just a poetic form, it is the form or our dreams: the dream that poetry can take the mind home to original beauties; that the life of each of us is bound to a joy at the midmost of the world; that language can tease a bright reality from the catastrophes of the day; that we may learn to change ourselves, in hopes of becoming hidden sidekicks of light, useful, practical, bemused.

To bring home these dreams, Nightingale’s poems travel the world in body and soul. So, the Cinnamon Theologies—“Cinnamon” for the sensual world, the amorous overture, our delight in earth and spice and song, the promise of love and the unity with the beloved. And “Theologies” for the everyday presence of the divine, all the transcendental elements in our hours, in word or event; and the call to us of another a better world.

Memorize these poems. Live with them, where “love is a place” and where when you “open a door a world comes through.”

Steven Nightingale’s sonnets are spiritually haunted, observing ordinary life through a lens of cosmic perspective. The poems are bathed in romance and shaped by the introspective love of woman and child. Visionary and independent, the work itself grows out of deep love and affinity for the sonnet form, its bones of rhyme and meter.

—Joyce Jenkins
Poetry Flash

Steven Nightingale is faithful to his name, being the invisible singer of sonnets disguised in form but overheard as a master should be. He addresses the world. Steven is a throwback to art with the morning air of reality.

—Willis Barnstone
Author of The Gnostic Bible, Six Masters of the Spanish Sonnet, 501 Sonnets

Steven Nightingale’s sonnets are finely wrought and full of light. Formally elegant, they are a testimony to a life richly lived. Many are poems of marriage and familial love, transformative, healing, good.

—Mary O’Malley
The Perfect V, Poem

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

—Billy Collins
Former U.S Poet Laureate

 

Steven Nightingale is the author of two novels and    three books of sonnets, including The Planetary Tambourine. A native Nevadan, he now divides his time between his home state, the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, and Granada, in southern Spain.