Description
Book SynopsisBright star, would I were stedfast as thou art —
Breaking open John Keats’s “Last Sonnet,” Ali Blythe writes marginality into the canon, at once claiming, reviving, and un-fixing the Romantic vision.
Taking place over one night, the poet in bed next to a sleeping lover, Blythe’s revelatory poems struggle with questions of illusion and reality, immersion and escapism, that which endures and that which is transient. Held taut in formal quivers of short lines, each poem is shot through with eros — to address, to dress and undress, the subject of the love poem and perhaps love itself.
Trade Review“
Stedfast is one of those books that reminds me why I love poetry. ‘Each new day is cut / from the key of the last;’ if the same is true of each new poem, here’s a set of gleaming keys cut from Keats’s sonnet. Where Keats’s bright star shines stedfastly, Blythe’s star offers an unsteady light. Instead of longing for constancy, the lyric ‘I’ of
Stedfast loves and desires within the quivering here and now — and the poignancy of this love gives me all the feels.” -- Sue Sinclair, author of
Almost Beauty“Just like the two asterisks on a blank page, ‘two figures continue / their delicate revolutions,’ or an unsteady star,
Stedfast is a slow burn that leaves a mark.” -- Joe Enns *
British Columbia Review *
