Image of Lyn Hejinian (right) by Gloria Graham, 2005.
The poems in Lyn Hejinian’s The Unfollowing are to the sonnet what the prose poem is to verse. They are fourteen lines long and, more importantly, poems of love and loss. In the press materials, Omnidawn publisher Rusty Morrison tells us that the poems are “a sequence of elegies” although “they are not sonnets but antisonnets.”
Part 1: To close the streaming eye
All is black shadow, but the lucid line Marked by the light surf on the level sand, Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land Mislead the pilgrim — such the dubious ray That wavering reason lends, in life’s long darkling way. — Charlotte Smith, “Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening”
