Forms from Chaos: Sonnets and Other Poems

By Ian Enters

This is a collection of forty-one sonnets together with twenty examples of villanelles, pantoum, Spenserian stanza, various ballad and rhyming couplet verses alongside “free verse” but the abiding focus is the sonnet both in Petrarchan and Elizabethan form.

The book’s introduction provides a concise account of the sonnet’s history with examples. Between each section of poems there are brief contextual comments.

From puppy training to philosophy, from self-pity to dancing, from AI to Wet Sand, from the Goodies to Shoe cleaning, the poems share immediate experiences and conjure magic from them. Day by day thoughts expand into polemics, the natural world, links to other poets and thinkers. The technical skills needed in poetic forms create strong structures through which powerful thoughts and emotions are distilled.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805148333

Ian Enters

A graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, Ian Enters worked in Education and became Adviser for English and the Arts in Sheffield. He is a published writer of four collections of poetry, three novels and libretti for school/community musicals. He wrote and produced the opera Avalon. His most recent publication, Word Hoard, comprises translations and re-workings of Anglo-Saxon and medieval poetry. Ian lives in Norfolk.

Book preview

Contents

Introduction and Brief History of the Sonnet in English Literature

DAY BY DAY

Spotting Stars

Dust

Large Thoughts

2nd April 2020 Birthday

Schism

Puppy Training

Freely Given Silence

NOW

Top Down

Self-pity

Dancing

Jig Not a Dirge

Humours

Overthinking

Never Stop

Artificial Intelligence

Choice

Inheritance

Wet Sand

For Tim Brooke-Taylor

Spit and Polish

Note on Day by Day Poems

THINKERS AND POETS

Analytic and Sensory Philosophy

Carl Jung considers the futility of words in the continuous presence of silence

Cartier Bresson photograph on Pont des Arts

Iris Murdoch – Metaphor for Morality and Mind’s Mortality

Kant – politics and aesthetics

Nietzche towards end of life beyond good and evil

Lady Ottoline-Morrell’s photo of nine friends at Garsington Manor with Bertrand Russell as main focus on the bottom step

Photo-booth portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein 1930 and Portrait for the Conferment of Scholarship Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926

W H Auden and the ashes of anxiety

Coleridge – offers a rock in the torrent of his talking

Wordsworth’s birthday – 7th April 1770

Mary Shelley reads Charlotte Turner Smith’s sonnet and thinks of her Mother, Mary Woolstonecraft

Stained Glass

Finding Shelley

Summer Solstice in Spenserian Stanzas

Note on Thinkers and Poets

POLEMICS

Psoriasis

Parasite

Blind Clarity

National Saint

Behind the Mask

Coda to Behind the Mask

Rhyming Couplets for a Press Briefing

Do Not Return

Note on Polemical Poems

NATURE

No Cage

Dawn-Fox

Garden Voice

Small Grave

Treason

Quest

Truce

Easter Bonnet

Precious

Wimbleball Lake

Barn

For a Wedding

Myopia

Persephone

Moorland Walk

Pantoum of Deceit

Solstice Spring Garden at Dawn

Note on Nature Poems

Acknowledgements

About the Author

In truth the prison into which we doom

Ourselves, no prison is; and hence for me,

In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound

Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.

William Wordsworth (c 1807 from his sonnet ‘Nuns Fret Not’)

Introduction and Brief History of the Sonnet in English Literature

Over the last few years my poetry writing has tended towards more traditional forms and this book celebrates that experience. The primary spur towards publication was the enforced self-isolation caused by government imposed restrictions during the Covid pandemic. Inward-looking and renewal through reading, closeness to the immediate environment and solitary walking within a repeated structure for every day created a fragile self-sufficiency and focus on a daily task – the writing of a sonnet as a discipline and a reassurance that my mind was not atrophying with increasing age and lack of stimulus.

My earlier poetic practice mainly found expression in what is often called free verse, in which meaning and development within a sequence of thoughts finds its own instinctive structures both from line to line and section to section. There is great satisfaction in honing that process to create a tight and rich outcome appropriate for its subject matter and moving to a resolution. Perhaps this is the purpose of all creation, not just poetry. I wanted to find and speak with my own voice rather than as a derivative from others’ practice. Of course, such an intention is impossible to achieve and there are echoes throughout a poet’s work of others’ influences and ways of being, but I relish the challenge of writing with integrity and from my own personality whether within free or formal structures.

It is tempting to adduce the main reason for this book is that with age I have become less experimental in my writing, more clad in the clothes of the past, and there may be some truth in that. I have studied the canon of literature throughout my life and revelled in its variety within evolving forms. This absorption brings wonderful enjoyment of the brilliance of poets balanced on the edge and finding new routes into visionary expression. It is the poets of visionary power who capture my heart as well as my head from all sorts of backgrounds, cultures and times. In fact I would argue that all fine poets must create visions into the heart of existence. The ways into such a frisson, when truth