Inventing Love

They met when both were young and she already married, with waist-long, gold-red hair that called instantly to mind Sappho's "girl with hair like a falling flame."

Now, nearly half a century later, award-winning poet Frank Salvidio has gathered together the sonnets addressed to her, some previously published in journals and anthologies, and fashioned them into a sonnet sequence which chronicles their enigmatic, mutual attraction, which dates from that first meeting.

Whether it is, as she suggests, a love invented to provide a poet with a theme, or the fatal attraction which his poetry expresses, these sonnets trace its history from the point of view of someone who still does not know if it is real or illusory; and their arrangement recreates this quixotic relationship in all its ambiguity, from the closing couplet of the title sonnet,

"Yet if your hard analysis is true

That fabled love sustains me, still it's you," to the conclusion of the last, which defines it as

.."..................a play within

A play of ifs and buts, of would and should,

A world not realized, not understood."