Inventing Love: A Sonnet Sequence

By Frank Salvidio

They met when both were young and she already married, with waist-long, gold-red hair that called instantly to mind Sapphos girl with hair like a falling flame.

Now, nearly half a century later, award-winning poet Frank Salvidio has gathered together the sonnets addressed to her, some previously published in journals and anthologies, and fashioned them into a sonnet sequence which chronicles their enigmatic, mutual attraction, which dates from that first meeting.

Whether it is, as she suggests, a love invented to provide a poet with a theme, or the fatal attraction which his poetry expresses, these sonnets trace its history from the point of view of someone who still does not know if it is real or illusory; and their arrangement recreates this quixotic relationship in all its ambiguity, from the closing couplet of the title sonnet,

Yet if your hard analysis is true

That fabled love sustains me, still its you,

to the conclusion of the last, which defines it as

..a play within

A play of ifs and buts, of would and should,

A world not realized, not understood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450274722

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Copyright © 2010 Frank Salvidio

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-7470-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-7471-5 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-7472-2 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 12/18/2010

Cover by Tracy Rosiene

From an Original Drawing by Alan Rosiene

For

the girl whose hair was a falling flame

Sappho.98(a)

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my thanks to the various editors of Common Ground Review, The Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, The Thomas Howard Poetry Contest and Wising Up Press, in whose publications several of these sonnets have already appeared, for permission to reprint them here.

I would also like to thank Tracy Rosiene for graciously providing the book’s cover, which she created from the leafless tree in a drawing by her late father, artist and musician Alan Rosiene, who twice in the past had provided me with covers for my books. How gratifying it is to know that the old friendship, begun in grammar school, has endured into the next generation.

I should also like to thank the Staff