The Gardening Fires is Jérôme Luc Martin’s first collection of poems -- a sonnet sequence set among the pines and inlets of the Mediterranean coast.
Each sonnet is coupled with a fragment that simultaneously extends and deconstructs the original poem’s language, theme, and music. These pairs of poems, which balance formal rigour with cascading incompleteness, are rooted in a tradition reaching from Lowell back to Petrarch, and deal the loss of love and its haunting persistence.