Howard Brenton's poems follow after ten years of plays, in performance and in print, and at first sight they seem like a new departure. The collection is a sequence of 74 sonnets, and has the kind of completeness and individual authority associated with the traditional sonnet sequence. Yet in two important respects Brenton's poems are at least as organic to his dramatic purpose as those of Brecht and Bond. First, as his title, Sonnets of Love and Opposition, suggests, the poems are an attempt to chart his everyday landscape, moral and physical, and the poems operate through actual description more than universal images, so that the sequence has something of the effect of a journal, a record of experience and development over a number of months.

That this experience covers a very wide range of subject matter is one reason for the collection's great interest. The other lies in...