Asked how long it took him to write a poem, the late Norman Macaig invariably answered "two fags". Don Paterson wonders whether Macaig's fine extempore sonnet "Rag and Bone" took even that long to compose before deciding, "who cares?" Christopher Ricks would probably put gangsta rap into The Oxford Book of English Verse before writing an editorial note like that.
101 Sonnets from Shakespeare to Heaney is an enjoyable pocket-sized trawl through sonnet history, made all the livelier by a fizzy introduction and a poem-by-poem commentary by the editor. Paterson's title is far from accurate: I counted nine poets born before Shakespeare, the earliest of them (Wyatt) in 1503. If sonnets have been around a long time, though, it isn't because the form has remained static over the centuries. There have been Petrarchan, Spenserian, Shakespearean, rhymed, unrhymed, Meredithian, Harrisonian and Muldoonian sonnets, all represented here.
Not all 14-line poems are sonnets, and not all sonnets are 14 lines long. Hopkins's curtal sonnets stop after ten and a half and his caudate sonnet, "That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire", runs to 20, with a couple of "tails" thrown in too.
Paterson opens with Frost's "The Silken Tent", indisputably one of the finest modern examples of the form. Page after page throws up fresh slivers of genius: Herbert's "Prayer", Milton's "On His Deceased Wife", Stevens's "The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain" (a sonnet?), Rochester's vicious "Regime de Vivre" and Weldon Kees's stunningly bitter "For My Daughter".
Someone not in Ricks's Oxford Book either, but whose mastery of the sonnet makes his absence particularly felt here, is Richard Murphy. What slack there is tends to come from the youngsters: compared to a great library poem (if not a sonnet) like MacNeice's "The British Museum Reading Room", Sean O'Brien's "Note on the Use of the Library (Basement Annexe)" looks fatuous and trite. But there is no shortage of riches here to compensate. In the closing words of Herbert's "Prayer":
Exalted manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices; something under-stood.'
David Wheatley is a poet and academic