Sonnets of a Budding Bard

What happens when a schoolboy picks up quill and ambition and attempts the most demanding verse form in English? Disaster, delightfully. These 25 sonnets adopt the strict Shakespearean structure - fourteen lines of impeccable rhyme and meter - then populate them with recitations interrupted by stomach rumbles, recitations gone wrong, and the eternal tragedy of Monday morning. Nixon Waterman captures something true about childhood: the way small catastrophes feel like cosmic events, and how the gap between our aspirations and our reality is comedy waiting to happen. Written in the voice of a boy who takes himself very seriously indeed, these poems gently mock both the pretensions of adult poetry and the earnest dramas of youth. John A. Williams' illustrations amplify the humor, rendering the young poet as a figure of grave importance contemplating matters of grave importance - a missed recess, a broken pencil, a girl who doesn't know he exists. The charm is in the contrast: formal verse meets chaos, lofty ambition meets a arithmetic test in ten minutes.