The Wings of What You Say

Steven Nightingale s love for the sonnet has turned it molten, supple, fashioned it newly for new purposes. The sonnets in The Wings of What You Say move couplet, triplet, quatrain, triplet, couplet, symmetrically adding to fourteen. He opens a peacock s tail of nature and human nature in the strange initiatives of these marvelous poems, makes them into Bhakti sonnets, truly devotional literature. --Poetry Flash

Beauty, Soul, World, these words- common as bread yet lustrous, mysterious- weave through the aptly named Steven Nightingale's lovely, soulful and world-rich collection of sonnets. In their form, they're not Petrarchan, not Shakespearean, not Spencerian, not Miltonic. We must conclude, finally, they are Nightingalian. --Suzanne Lummis, author of In Danger, Director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival

We soar. We descend-we unravel the climate of the heart and the sensual voltage of soul. We go past history because these ninety-nine songs want us, in this life, within all life. The range is expansive, Petrarch s meter precise, the voice, familiar and public, almost as if we do have wings, angelic, earth-hued, radiant. Here we find our call, our meaning and dreaming. A 21st century Neruda, a poet s and people s masterpiece. --Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of California