Sonnets for Sinners: Everything One Needs to Know About Illicit Love - Hardcover

Wareham, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566499593 ISBN 13: 9781566499590

Publisher: Welcome Rain Publishers, 2010

Synopsis

A Pulitzer Poetry Nominee to Define the Decade. A garland of forty-nine life-changing sonnets, from classic to avante garde, each with a companion page of insight that illumines the secret emotional lives of  illicit lovers.  Hidden meanings and insights are unveiled by bestselling writer, poet and psychologist John Wareham, who also distills and dissects sonnets from the infamous Charles and Camilla cell phone conversation, lines from Princess Diana, the text messages that trapped Tiger Woods, and transcripts from the John and Elizabeth Edwards media meltdown. To absorb this literary gem is to know why the New York Times observed, "John Wareham has the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth."

About this title

From the Author:

To my surprise, five sonnets by the Other Woman in my novel Chancey On Top received lavish praise, so I decided to incorporate them into in an anthology of illicit love sonnets. And, drawing upon my professional life, to include a page of insight and advice on the facing page of each poem. When the Tiger Woods' textings to his mistress appeared on the internet they seemed so heartfelt that I decided to try to tinker them into sonnets and include them, too. This worked well so I did the same with public domain material from other pop-culture icons, including John and Elizabeth Edwards, Prince Charles, Princess Diana, and Camilla Shand. I love the Princess Diana sonnet. Bear in mind that these are her exact words; I merely tinkered them into sonnet form. Here's the opening quatrain:

Being a princess isn't all it's cracked up to be;
I never wanted gifts or fancy wages,
just to be Queen of Hearts and then decree
love for the unloved to last for ages.

My favorite in the collection is Elan Haverford's Longing, in which she reveals the pain of being an Other Woman. She tells does this by describing a surreal village called Thinkingofyou:

The village I dwell in, Thinkingofyou,
Is a maddeningly melancholy town
Where the clocks are locked in a strange snafu
And the forget-me-nots are hand-me-downs.

Throughout the anthology we see the world through the prism of poets trapped in love triangles. I use each sonnet as a springboard to a page of insight into the heart, mind, and voyage of the poet. It is easy to pontificate, but it is difficult to be wise; easy to funny but difficult to be witty: I wanted to those finished pages to both enlighten and entertain. The reader will be the judge of whether I succeeded - though to truly understand the reality of the prison of illicit love, one must first pass through it as an inmate. (If you like that analogy, you'll likely also enjoy my How to Break Out of Prison, which distills my lifetime experience counseling corporate executives at one end of the spectrum, and prison inmates at the other.)

Existentialists say that we are alone in the world and that this life is the only one we have. If so, it might be wise to scrap the notion that attraction to one person cannot coexist with a serious affection for another. So, if you meet a person in whose presence you no longer feel unloved and lonely, then to fail to succumb to the temptation to fully experience that person might perhaps be a form of disloyalty.
 
 
 

From the Inside Flap:

COME RIDE THE HEART'S SECRET HIGHWAY
Sonnets disclose journeys of illicit love perfectly. A forbidden drama unfolds in just twelve lines, then a two-line heroic couplet delivers a startling message, a veritable epiphany.
To absorb this startling compilation is to share the delights and despairs of a stunning phalanx of sinners, including ardent Mary Wroth, mordant Michael Drayton, shameless Alfred Douglas, mystical W. B. Yeats, rebellious Edna St. Vincent Millay, unrepentant Edna Worthley Underwood, and puckish Chandler Haste.

About this edition

• Publisher: Welcome Rain Publishers
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1566499593
• ISBN 13: 9781566499590
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144