“Samuel Johnson’s gallstone was ‘about the size of a pigeon’s egg.’ (Compare the size of Pepys’s!)”
– Richard Altick, The Scholar Adventurers

Samuel Pepys suffered from a grand gallstone.
Some claim it was fat as a tennis ball.
He had it removed and placed on display
For visitors, and would freely postpone
A tale of war, plague, or great fire to tell
Readers that he had wet himself that day.
Years kept his keepsake but left the journals.
We may never discover Shakespeare’s notes
For Hamlet, or Byron’s burned memoir,
But an orb so solid, perhaps eternal,
Would be a great find. Though missing, one hopes
Something so large can’t have gotten too far,
That if we can’t name the man from Porlock,
We may still unearth Pepys’s famous rock.

Publisher’s Announcement

Calculated to reflect the sixty minutes in an hour of heightened imaginative contemplation, the poems in Ernest Hilbert’s first book, Sixty Sonnets, contain memories of violence, historical episodes, humorous reflections, quiet despair, violent discord, public outrage, and private nightmares. A cast of fugitive characters share their desperate lives—failed novelists, forgotten literary critics, cruel husbands, puzzled historians, armed robbers, jobless alcoholics, exasperated girlfriends, high school dropouts, drowned children, and defeated boxers. These characters populate love poems (“My love, we know how species run extinct”), satires (“The way of the human variety, / Not even happy just being happy”), elegies (The cold edge of the world closed on you, kissed / You shut”), and songs of sorrow (“Seasons start slowly. They end that way too”). The original rhyme scheme devised for this sequence—ABCABCDEFDEFGG—allows the author to dust off of the Italian “little song” and Americanize the Elizabethan love poem for the twenty-first century. Speaking at times in propria persona (“We’ll head out, you and me, have a pint”), at times in the voice of both male and female characters (“I’m sorry I left you that day at MoMA”), at times across historical gulfs (“Caesar and Charlemagne, Curie, Capone”), Sixty Sonnets marshals both trivia and tragedy to tell stories of modern America, at last achieving a hard-won sense of careful optimism, observing “the last, noble pull of old ways restored, / Valued and unwanted, admired and ignored.”