It’s all music to me, whether sung or recited. Well-wrought words have an incantatory power to move us, to grip us, to entice us. And that’s what I’ve aimed for in The Running Sonnets, a homage to running. There are 41 poems covering all aspects of running with complementary visuals for each. Its firmly striding design is the work of Susan Forrest Castle, and with its blend of words and images there is nothing like it in the literature of running or of sport.
And they are real 14-line sonnets, as full of rhyme as they are of running. I call them “the runners of poetry: lean, taut, intense, focused.”
May I make this suggestion if you order the volume: Choose the printed book (Amazon). That way you’ll see the pages as they were intended to be seen, with each poem facing its chosen visual.
And if you’d like to invite me to read for you, I’ll come.
The Jewels of the Road
Being a runner first, last and foremost,
I went on through life pulling my 5k’s
To pulverize the temptation to coast
In any significant means and ways.
I wanted intensity. And found it
In the exhilaration of a sprint,
Or an uphill at a single bound, it
Leaving me juvenated, breathless, mint.
I wanted the same in my working life
And took those exhilarations back there
To increase th’odds that I would wield my knife
With a surgeon’s deftness, flashing and fair.
All these tenacities running bestowed
So generously, the jewels of the road.
