A Tree and Gone

The locales for these sonnets are those of modern America: shopping malls, a boardwalk fudge shop, bookstores, parks, intersections, beaches, housing subdivisions, highway overpasses. Wherever he finds himself, Culleton confronts the mystery of who we all are, what we have become. True to the sonnet’s roots in the songs of the troubadours, the musicality of these poems resonates even as the language remains colloquial. Culleton’s mastery of the form is such that each sonnet reads as naturally as any free verse poem. Unlike much unmetered poetry, though, they seem also to want to be read aloud. While any one of these poems can be gotten in one read, all of them bear up under re-reading, yielding further nuances of sound and significance. Each is an epiphany, large or small, to be gone back to again and again for what, in Robert Frost’s words, poetry offers: A momentary stay against confusion.