Divers - by Samuel Amadon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Marking a formal reinvention for the poet, this collection addresses the strangeness of time, blending writers and images from the past with contemporary scenes.

This book-length sequence of turbulent sonnets follows their speaker's impulses and imagination through the seasons of their composition. Written between 2016 and 2022, Divers is a collection shaped by contradiction and marks a new period of lyric experimentation for poet Sam Amadon. These poems are rigorously constrained while also making space for improvisation. They hold to a decasyllabic line while moving in and out of meter. They sing of time, and struggle to understand it. They find words for our moment in the pages of old books. Lines from great writers of the past--including Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Wyatt, and Michael Drayton--echo through Amadon's poems of contemporary menace and wonder. Here we see both the owls lining our fences and the black SUVs rolling down our streets. Out of these conflicts, Amadon's sonnets step up, lift off, and dive into themselves.

Review Quotes

"Amadon's Divers offers a scintillating collection of sonnets that breathe as fluidly as flutes in a cathedral foyer. Through a Whitmanian musicality pulsing with intellectual curiosity, tuned to the organic world's quiet rhythms and inner weather, each poem acts as a station for language and consciousness modulating each other into a higher order of understanding. The result is a world dis-alienating poetry that thinks with the world, instead of about it."

"For centuries, the sonnet has provided the joy of exuberance within the constraints of received form, and Amadon's Divers extends the tradition of the art into a world that is familiar but, in his hands, is also newly strange. With language that is spiked with an intoxicating spirit, Amadon's new work is both stimulant and balm."

"I love this book. Assured and expansive, Amadon's sonnets achieve an exquisite balance of rigor and ease. Each poem drops the reader into a mind where inner climate and outer climate are often indistinguishable, and where weather becomes both subject and method. Attentive, embodied, and turning with the turning of seasons, these sonnets are alive to the conditions that make thought itself possible, issuing an invitation to fall in love with living again and again."