I have recently had ten sonnets printed in an anthology of sonnets called Extreme Sonnets, edited and published by Beth Houston. The point with the epithet is that the sonnets are extremely formal. They all employ iambic pentameter, full rhymes and traditional rhyming schemes.
There are 42 poets in the anthology, 37 from the USA, and five from the UK. And I’m one of five that have the maximum of ten sonnets. There are 194 sonnets in all.
It’s been done very well. And there’s a foreword by an acclaimed formal poet, Rhina P. Espaillat, who will be 90 next year. She mentions one of my sonnets. If you click on the “look inside” function on the top left of the Amazon page, you can see the Foreword, the Preface, the Contents, the first six sonnets, and the back cover.
My ten sonnets are, in the order that I wrote them:
2007 Shades of Venice & Dunderhead
2008 On Esperance Bay
2009 Just Rain
2010 Regret, Lisa Leaving, No Bloody Way! & The Big Smoke
2013 The End & Chess with Monsieur Joffroy
They can be found in my collection of sonnets, which is online.
The years 2007-2013 were ones of great crisis for me personally. In 2007 my wife and I fled from our home on Fanø because of a stalker. Both my wife and I became ill, in my case mentally (PTSD) and in my wife’s case physically (Graves’ disease). But I stood firm on the rock of my poetry and songs and received encouragement from other poets on the online poetry forum, Eratosphere, which I’d joined in 2005. It gets a shout-out in the Preface.
There are some reviews on Amazon’s American page.
Now just waiting for the good reviews in various literary magazines…
Beth Houston is doing two more anthologies this year. Check out the submission guidelines here.