The Retreats of Thought

The Retreats of Thought is a book-length sonnet sequence that takes the reader through the philosophical domain, addressing classic questions, raising new questions, and sometimes doing philosophy in fourteen lines. Kelly Cherry studied philosophy in graduate school at the University of Virginia and has never lost her deep love of the subject. She believes that our lives are intimately bound to the philosophical choices we make and that conscious study of our choices can lead to greater freedom. After all, what do we really know of our world? Why is there anything at all? What is time? What is a person? What is mind? What are goodness and beauty? What does the artist seek? These and other problems are shrewdly examined in Cherry's passionate, skeptical, witty, and sometimes wry poems. Cherry places herself, by the way, in the pragmatic tradition of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce but admits to Platonic longings.