Bill Homewood is one of very few poets today using the Elizabethan sonnet form. In the preface to one of his collections - SONNETS FOR THE GODLY & THE DAMNED - "a handbook for the cocky sonneteer" - Bill wrote: "In a sonnet, you can follow your heart for twelve lines, and use your head in the last two." The late Sir Stephen Spender, USA Poet Laureate, wrote of Bill's poetry: "... a controlled carelessness which makes me very envious, and a swinging gaiety which is quite authentic." Novelist Adam Thorpe wrote: "Drawing on his long experience as Shakespearean Actor as well as a skilled poet, Bill Homewood has produced a delightful and slightly irreverent homage to the sonnet form ... lively metaphors and alluring music ... a lovely book." In 50 SONNETS, you will find more of Homewood's humour, irony and regret. Homewood has assembled sonnets from previous publications and new work, as ever exploring his own obsessions with Time, Love and Destiny. On the back cover of this book you will read Sir Derek Jacobi's review: "Bill sings in praise of the beautiful and versatile sonnet, with infectious lightness and humour. For the poetry lover he is a delight - for everyone else he is a revelation." Multi-award-winning poet Benjamin Zephaniah writes: "These 50 sonnets read as if they were created by Nature as she observed the wonder and the mess of modern times, not by a bloke called Bill Homewood. But Bill did write them, and I loved them. The future just got better. Long live the sonnet!"
