Southernmost Sonnets
Leo Boix, Chatto & Windus, £12.99

LEO BOIX is a prize-winning Argentine-British poet and translator.

Southernmost Sonnets comprises 100 semi-rhyming sonnets presented in lower-case sentences as is standard for much contemporary poetry. Boix’s loosely adapted 14-line sonnet structure, often using a Shakespearean or Petrarchan rhyme scheme, is employed unobtrusively here. He makes good use of the volta, the shift in tone or argument that comes around a third of the way through a sonnet. His command of poetic English and a rich vocabulary (“fulgurous”, “garniture”) are impressive.

An isolated sonnet introducing the series concludes on a kind of epiphany: “collecting items so that one day I’d be immortal./ ... a world/ conjured out of an encyclopaedia, a rose that starts to unfurl.”

Many of Boix’s poems are autobiographical, relating to his late parents and his upbringing in Argentina. Sonnet 3 depicts a pregnancy: “I see her talking to him through that invisible veil, a membrane/ that moves as she whispers,” and they work best when using figurative language and symbolism: “diamonds/ like white gooseberries gleam” (6) or “Gold mines have bloomed from the lethal waterways” (13). Poems depicting his same-sex relationship are nicely descriptive: “You live like teenagers, my sister often tells us. No children/ or attachments, like true bohemians. Our house is a fantasy/ castle filled with many ornaments, a strange Baroque pavilion/ where one man draws, and the other composes elegies” (70).

There are poems on the turbulent political history of South America: “marked plots I once saw in Argentina,/ dotted with small flags and numbers, a strange mortuary/ under the sun where our history lies, made by hyenas” (50). The historically lionised Captain Cook is depicted more like a brutal Conquistador than a naval explorer, and a sonnet on the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt is strikingly homoerotic: “And as he was about to go ashore, he saw two pirogues sailing/ along the coast, and in each, eighteen Guaiqueri Indians naked/ to the waist. He thought they looked so muscular, compelling/ with a skin colour between shining brown and coppery red” (72).

He has a colouristic eye: “a giant lobster, a drab round/ About and a flyover, even a bright red scene of early artillery” (46) or “...a 1756 map with a few blocks painted as pink as cherries” (51); and also a naturalist’s eye: “In the humid highlands of Mesoamerica, the Quetzal calls/ resplendent in opaline greens, her bright red belly ablaze/ ...A solitary pilco hides under waterfalls” (90).

But some of this is what one might term ”Covert Naturalism”: figurative language and imagery disguising a more political subtext, so that Sonnet 9, for instance, ostensibly about “The world’s smallest armadillo, the so-called pichiciego...// ...king of the endless Patagonia,” is a metaphor for Argentine soldiers who, according to the Note at the back of the book: “burrowed for days underground like the armadillo” as referred to by writer Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill in his book Los Pichiciegos (1982).

Boix also tries his hand at sonnet corona: a series of sonnets interlinked by repeating the last line of the previous verse as the first line of the subsequent one. “The Crown of the Virgin” contains some consummate lines: “As a centrepiece, a large Capodimonte vase of roses adorns/ the family table. On the wall, Jesus & his crown of thorns,” and there are references to Roman Catholicism throughout: “Father Paez tells us ... ‘the Jesuits lost/ two hundred thousand Indians, all ripe for the kingdom of Christ’” (47).

Sonnet 70 is a nice play on that board game of capitalist staple, Monopoly, where Boix juxtaposes the Argentine version which focuses on farming rather than property. Monopoly was actually intended to be anti-monopolist: originally called The Landlord’s Game, it was invented in 1903 by American writer and Georgist, Lizzie Magie, to educate players on the single-tax theory as laid out in Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879). The Argentine version seems more modelled on Magie’s original: “A game to learn about adulthood, mortgages and poverty.”

All in all, Southernmost Sonnets is as disarming a collection as an album of butterflies.