Abstract

The following work consists of seventy-eight sonnets, many of them arranged in narrative sequences or quasi-narrative thematic groups, and all of them gathered into an etymological artifice derived from the title. The various possible meanings resonating from the word transparencies--whose prefix indicates (depending on context) the prepositions across, over, above, and beyond; and whose Latin root parere, to show, suggests affinities to appearance and phenomenon--seemed to echo themes in the work and to provide a structure wherein its sometimes metaphysical, sometimes mundane preoccupations might be, as it were, musically reconciled. These orchestrated obsessions include a religious impulse to ground the word in the world (and vice versa), an aesthetic commitment to the imagination, a whimsical compulsion to deal ironically with "serious" subjects, a grudging acknowledgment of (the poet's) ethical shortcomings, and a celebration of the vicissitudes, vexations, volupte, and verities of contemporary life. As for the choice of form, the sonnet--with its metrical lines anchored in tradition, and its rhythms bellying with the winds of contemporary speech--aptly accommodates and expresses the tensions inherent in such themes, and proves its continued viability as a medium of poetic sensibility. The poet's gratitude to those eminent precursors who first Englished and enhanced the sonnet--and to their successors who have repeatedly vindicated the form before him--is here expressed in allusion, parody, imitation, and homage. In this regard, Transparencies serves as a shifting kaleidoscope trained on the history of an art.