Archive - October 25, 2012

Seven Sonnets by Julie R. Dargis (Morocco 1984-87) $5.99 16 pages 2012 Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79) As a girl growing up in New England, I visited many colonial houses-the Paul Revere house on the Freedom Trail in Boston, the birthplaces of John Adams and John Quincy Adams in what is now Adams National Historic Park just south of Boston, the houses at Old Sturbridge Village in central Massachusetts and Historic Deerfield in western Massachusetts where the famous massacre took place. Framed on the walls of these houses, the cross-stitch sampler proved an ubiquitous artifact. Its (often wobbly) stitches testified to the progress a young girl had made in acquiring elemental skills in needlework. Seven Sonnets, a new chapbook by Julie R. Dargis, qualifies as the poetic version of such a sampler. It serves at once as affirmation of Dargis’s painstaking attention to the sonnet form and as indication . . .