The online literary magazine Solstice has just released its spring 2011 issue, which includes two of the poems that will appear in my forthcoming CavanKerry collection. One of these poems, "Astrolabe," is yet another Shakespearean sonnet, and I hope you're not getting sick of them. As I might have already told you, a couple of winters ago I spent a few months copying out all of Shakespeare's sonnets while simultaneously trying to keep what I was calling a "diary" of sonnets. Most were awful, but several managed to survive, and they are the ones that are beginning to trickle into publication.

The other poem in Solstice ("Spring on the Ripley Road") is somewhat older and dates from when my children were younger than they are now. I wrote it, submitted it fruitlessly to magazines, got rejections, forgot about the poem, and then recently rediscovered and overhauled it. The task of imposing more advanced revision tactics on an early-ish piece was fairly interesting and makes me think that reediting old poems might be less heartbreaking than I've assumed it would be. But possibly this one was a fluke.