Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: A New Commentary (Faber Poetry) - Tapa blanda

'What Paterson is really concerned with - and where the book soars above the competition - is how the poems work; how Shakespeare uses and abuses the sonnet form to achieve his effects.
Given that Paterson is one of the finest living poets working in the sonnet form, he brings to this a craftsman's insight and refreshing candour... The great merit of this book - and where it differs from so much academic literary criticism - is that, however eccentric it may occasionally be, it is never dull and frequently brilliant.' --Hugh Thomson, Independent

'An entertaining, exuberant and obsessively passionate guide . . . his measured and engaging essays display a deep and sophisticated understanding of every aspect of the poems ... Even the seasoned Shakespeare aficionado will come away knowing something new or aware of some subtle change of emphasis that might widen their enjoyment and experience of the sonnets ... The insights and opinions the book contains are fascinating... Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets is an impressive work and there is a lifetime of enjoyment to be had from this loquacious and erudite book.' --Adam O'Riordan, Sunday Telegraph

'Like all the best literary criticism, it combines highly sensitive attention to detail - the exact meaning of a word, the way in which a poetic image does its work, the tricks of metrical variation - with due awareness of historical context and specificity. It's also great fun.' --Jonathan Bate, Financial Times

'What we have is a splendidly energetic and thought-provoking exercise in close textual reading that is written in a prose style which veers wildly from the colloquium to the colloquial to the downright chatty ... this humanely priced volume does the one thing truly needful: it takes the fear out of reading Shakespeare.' --Irish Times

'Like all the best literary criticism, it combines highly sensitive attention to detail - the exact meaning of a word, the way in which a poetic image does its work, the tricks of metrical variation - with due awareness of historical context and specificity. It's also great fun.' --Jonathan Bate, Financial Times

Shakespeare's Sonnets are as important and vital today as they were when first published four hundred years ago. Perhaps no collection of verse before or since has so captured the imagination of readers and lovers; certainly no poem has come under such intense critical scrutiny, and presented the reader with such a bewildering number of alternative interpretations. In this illuminating and often irreverent guide, Don Paterson offers a fresh and direct approach to the Sonnets, asking what they can still mean to the twenty-first century reader. In a series of fascinating and highly entertaining commentaries placed alongside the poems themselves, Don Paterson discusses the meaning, technique, hidden structure and feverish narrative of the Sonnets, as well as the difficulties they present for the modern reader. Most importantly, however, he looks at what they tell us about William Shakespeare the lover - and what they might still tell us about ourselves.