The Twelfth of Never

The Twelfth of Never, which comprises seventy-seven sonnets written in alexandrines, floats on (or submerges in) the ideal republic or the Otherworld promised in fairy stories, aislings, the land of Cockaigne, lines of cocaine, drunkenness, "the land of the green rose," poppy-day imperialism, Loyalist and Fenian ballads, and the rhetoric of July 12th--all realms of or tickets to Utopia. The combination of pleasant, even rollicking, conveyance--iambs and anapests, disguised rhymes, lilting lines--and sinister endings evokes certain kinds of fairy stories, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann's.