sonnets for the fall

by Nate Pritts

Season III of THE WONDERFULL YEARE, a process-collage Shepherd's Calendar.

Genres: Poetry

17 pages, chapbook

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Nate Pritts is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Post Human (2016) and Decoherence (2017). Publishers Weekly described his fifth book, Sweet Nothing (2011), as “both baroque and irreverent, banal and romantic, his poems […] arrive at a place of vulnerability and sincerity.” POETRY Magazine called his The Wonderfull Yeare (2009), “rich, vivid, intimate, & somewhat troubled” while The Rumpus called Big Bright Sun (2010) “a textual record of mistakes made and insights gleaned…[in] a voice that knows its part in self-destruction.”

Reviews

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nate Pritts clearly understands and is able to communicate the miracle of metamorphosis/transfiguration in his eloquent melancholic 'sonnets for the fall'. Over the course of fourteen poems Pritts invites us to witness or experience the changes of the seasons of nature - in these works that season is autumn.

Autumn/Fall is a time of momentary natural spectacle as the chilling nights transform the green leaves of spring's birth and summer's shading into the brilliant colors of red and gold and orange and yellow - and eventually brown as the autumnal costume is slowly dropped to the ground, leaving the patron tree bare and skeletal. Nate Pritts becomes that tree, witnessing the changes of seasonal destiny, and in doing so he allows the reader to enter the mystery of nature. Only in the last of the fourteen poems does he step out of the transmutation and speak as the poet/man of his experience:

'I want this to be the first time

the now the here

I'm lost to myself
breathing

these last fall leaves
I'm making up my self
an already dark sky
me again a piece lost

the stale sunlight the harsh outside

I'm not a tree

& the now that is going

an already dark sky &
the whole world brand new again'

Pritts explains that each of these sonnets was created by the collage process, cutting lines from previously written works and reconfiguring them into quasi random pieces of fleeting thoughts on one subject. But whatever the explanation of the process Nate Pritts makes, interesting though such sharing may be, the result if a work of enormous beauty. Crowning this 'sonnets for the fall' is a beautiful cover painting by Rhonda Gleason-Pritts, a painting that breathes yet more life into this very fine collection.

Grady Harp

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book--crafted without over-scaffolding, philosophical & lyrically open, "basic" in its language but highly complex as the poems always circle back on themselves. Terrific read.

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very nice: incantatory. Makes me feel like a tree growing, and losing its leaves. Recommended.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful poems.