They say poetry doesn't have to rhyme - but it can. And it can do a lot more, as well. Shaped by the author's love of patterns, informed by his expertise in linguistics, and rooted in deep emotion, this volume is a collection of formal poems with a serious tone. By turns inspiring, meditative, joyful, and despondent, the poems in this collection showcase the power of meter, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, dialect combination, and other methods of form manipulation to help us grapple with the mysteries of life.
This volume is part of the author's Levities and Gravities project, which demonstrates the value of linguistic form in poetry and highlights poetry's ability to evoke any emotion, whether light or heavy. This volume contains "gravities," or serious poems, but the associated volume,
Levities
, presents humorous poems. This second edition contains additional poems not included in the first edition, new author's notes, and an essay on the possibilities available in poetry.
Benjamin Cannicott Shavitz is a writer and linguistics scholar whose studies in language have led him to a great enthusiasm for formal poetry. His writing is influenced by his love of language, interest in technical structure, wild imagination, and broad knowledge base.