The Time We Have Misspent
100 Sonnets by M.Z. Ribalow
About the Author
M.Z. Ribalow was a poet, playwright and author. He had 24 of his plays receive some 180 productions worldwide, including at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and numerous times in London and NY. They have won awards in London, New York, and regionally.
He also won national awards for fiction, his widely published poetry, and musical lyrics; cowritten ten children’s books; and published articles on sports, music, theatre, literature, film, travel, and chess. He is co-author of three books on sports, and is Director of an award-winning sports website.
Several of his screenplays have been optioned; he was film columnist for The Sciences magazine, and has appeared as a film historian on The Discovery Channel and on special feature documentaries of several DVD releases of classic films including High Noon and Sergeant York.
M.Z. Ribalow was Artistic Director of New River, which in the past decade has developed some 400 new plays and screenplays, almost half of which have already been produced or optioned worldwide. New River writers have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Medal of Arts, the August Wilson Prize and the $100,000 Simonovitch Prize, among numerous other honors. He was Director of The New River Radio Show on Art International Radio, and series editor of the anthologies Plays from New River and Currents: New River Fiction.
He directed numerous plays in London and New York, was Joseph Papp’s Production Associate at the NY Shakespeare Festival for several years, and founded The American Repertory Company of London.
Meir was co-founder and Vice-President of The Creative Coalition as well as International Arts Coordinator of The Global Forum, where he worked with The Dalai Lama, Robert Redford and Mikhail Gorbachev. He was for 15 years full-time Artist-in-Residence at Fordham University.
2011, a banner year for Mr. Ribalow, saw the publication of a novel Peanuts and Crackerjacks, his fourth published play Masterpiece, and a poetry collection Chasing Ghosts.
“With this collection of sonnets, Meir Z. Ribalow takes his rightful place alongside the likes of Frost, Millay, Shelley, Keats and – yes, I’ll say it – Shakespeare, as one of our rare masters of the English language sonnet form. The evident joy with which Mr. Ribalow plays with language in each gem contained in this volume shows the freedom he feels where others find constraint; in the mere fourteen lines allotted him, Mr. Ribalow manages to take his readers on journeys as deep and as intimate as they are epic. You will be delighted, charmed, moved and awed by what you find in this collection. It is nothing short of astonishing.”
—Rhona Silverbush, co-author, Speak the Speech! Shakespeare’s Monologues Illuminated
ISBN 978-09855577-0-6
114 pages
$14.95
5.5" x 8.5" perfect bound, paper
Reviews
“By turns heartbreaking, wry, clever, and devastating (and sometimes all that and more in a single poem), these sonnets marry a precise attention to form with a casual conversational tone to create a universe of yearning observation. Combining the couplets of Pope with the concerns of Petrarch, Ribalow has created something new under the poetic sun that feels fresh and timeless at the same time. If you think sonnet-writing is a lost art, then this is the book to change your mind.”
—Matthew Wells, 2011 winner of the Donna Jo Davis Discovery Prize for Poetry
"I'm not one for poems as words-to-live-by...except when they're words to live by, like almost every one of these. They don't so much rediscover or reinvent the sonnet as remind us why we loved sonnets in the first place."
—Glen Hirshberg, winner of the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award, author of Motherless Child and The Book of Bunk
“This is an intelligent poet willing to address with tenderness, sometimes bluntness, all that he does not know – namely the reasons and rationales for the way a life unfolds. Still, ‘I breathe as deeply as I dare,’ he says, and in the saying makes his reader want to breathe more deeply as well.”
—Allison Elrod, 2012 winner of the Donna Jo Davis Discovery Prize for Poetry
