Named after the bar in Hong Kong where most of these poems were first performed, Joyce is Not Here is Andrew Barker's first collection of Modern Sonnets. Among the cast of characters within we hear from the Sea Shepherd, the Worn-out Private Tutor, the Newsworthy Activist, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Rumpelstiltskin, Beatrice Carbone from A View from the Bridge, Tony Blair contemplating accusations of war crimes, and even an eight-year old Shakespeare, primed with ambition. In the beat and rhyme of the sixteenth century love song, Joyce is Not Here: 101 Modern Shakespearean Sonnets is a revolution, not in form, but in content. As the essay on poetry included in this collection says: "If you know how to use it, the sonnet form will do a lot of work for you." Upon these pages sonnets deal with such diverse matters as hearing of Gore Vidal's death, watching The Damned in a wine bar in Hong Kong, the dangers of Donald Trump being successfully ridiculed on Saturday Night Live, on first looking into Keats' poem On First Looking into Chapman's Homer in the room where Keats died, reactions to observing Kevin Spacey as Richard the Third, or Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, or to Muhammad Ali defeating George Foreman in Kinshasa. Sonnets are written as dramatic monologues of characters from the television drama series Mad Men and The Wire, from the works of Homer, Neil Gaiman, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Charles Dickens and Dai Sijie, and as the poet himself, cautiously contemplating the world around him. Varied and moving, Joyce is Not Here shows us the remarkable scope of the modern-day sonnet, it is a celebration of what can be done with the sonnet now.
