A collection written over fifty years, Makes You Stop and Think is the latest work from the accomplished and renowned poet Daniel Hoffman.
''The sonnet is a sacred // vessel, it takes a civilization / to conceive its shape or know / its uses,'' the poet Louise Bogan told ''a crowd of bearded youths'' and ''rumpled girls.'' Hoffman's harvest of half a century's sonnets shows the richness and power of their form. These poems revel in exploring memory and feeling:
For reality is vintage and delicious
Especially when you taste it while it brews
Because it comes as love comes, heart-skip sudden,
Yet long as a lifetime in a once past wishes,
A gift you couldn't have the wit to choose.