The Light in Them Is Permanent
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.

There is a natural ecstatic in Steven Nightingale, whom one might situate on a scale somewhere between Emerson and Rumi. And there is also a craftsman—with a jeweler’s or watchmaker’s meticulousness—who wants to make the sonnet mimic his wonder at the architecture of things. They are both very present in this, his third sonnet sequence and they make a labor of praise and praise out of labor.

—Robert Hass
Former U.S. Poet Laureate

Here in these 99 sonnets, we are invited into a poet’s imagination as it is fulfilled through a singular form, which Steven Nightingale inhabits and uses to enact the various arguments and arrangements of a life. In case we’ve forgotten the examples of Shakespeare and Petrarch, we are here reminded that form, even one form, can allow a supple intelligence to display its full range and power even as it invokes the body in all its wonders and joys. Here, we find joined the force of ear and mind, both bent entirely upon delight.

—Katharine Coles
Utah Poet Laureate

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 501 Sonnets

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Praise for Steven Nightingales Sonnets

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 four books of sonnets, including The Planetary Tambourine. A native Nevadan, he lives with his family in Woodside, California.