The Never-Not Sonnets: Poems

These 14-line poems are sonnets in the loosest sense, written in the traditions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Berryman and Pablo Neruda. Greenberg ( The Spoils of August ) looks at love with an ironic, late 20th-century sensibility. In the first section the narrator and an unnamed man plot ``to spend our extreme old age together. She / would have left you by then; he would have predeceased me.'' In the second section the persona still addresses her lover as ``you'' but focuses on family and friends, past and present. After listing various sundering couples in ``Iris and Ron Are Divorcing,'' she comments, ``These rifts resound like thunder into my own marriage. / Iris and Ron especially; he and I stood up for them.'' But instead of wishing for divorce herself, she entreats: ``Dear one, if you love me, / stay true to her. As I'll to him. The loneliness / you and I assuage in each other has no home elsewhere.'' Some poems verge on the inconsequential, but collectively these pieces convey the rich admixture of everyday thoughts and feelings. (Aug.)