"When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought..."

Richard P. Sinay’s When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought… presents love as both a sustaining force and a source of prolonged grief. Its organizing principle is announced in the introduction, which borrows the movement of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: twelve lines of loss give way to a closing couplet of consolation. Sinay divides his collection accordingly, placing love poems in “The Joy of Love” and poems of separation, disappointment, and estrangement in “The Sadness of Loss.” The arrangement gives a large, accumulated body of work a legible emotional shape, though the poems’ unevenness makes the book feel more like a personal archive than a consistently finished collection.

The book’s greatest strength is its candor about the persistence of feeling. Sinay gathered poems written over many years from journals, letters, and emails, and the collection retains the changing circumstances of that long span. Some pieces are addressed to named partners; others record family relationships and memories. “Learning to Love” is among the most affecting, linking the speaker’s childhood experience of neglect to his determination to tell his own children he loves them. Its plain language suits the subject, and the image of children receiving a hug gives the poem a quiet emotional resolution. “Old Dishes,” meanwhile, uses a cracked dish set aside from the others to suggest the loneliness of a woman contemplating age and marriage. The domestic scene is more oblique than many of the love poems, and its central metaphor gives the reader room to interpret rather than simply being told what to feel.

Sinay is often most vivid when he anchors emotion in a particular place or object. The beach recurs as a setting for memory, separation, and reunion: in “Laguna Beach,” a passing ship recalls years of longing before the speaker’s happiness in the present; “The Quarter” turns a coin bearing the date 1965 into a small, improbable token of rediscovered love. “The Heart Charm” similarly builds on a found object, making a silver charm carry the weight of earlier affection. These poems show a consistent instinct for linking private feeling to tangible things. The collection’s most distinctive texture also comes from its personal particulars: golf, family milestones, television routines, travel, and the names and nicknames of loved ones. The long “Stanford Graduation Day, June 20, 2000” is less a compressed lyric than a family chronicle, but its sequence of childhood memories gives the book an unusually direct record of a father’s pride.

The division between joy and loss is useful, but it does not produce a simple emotional progression. Part I contains loneliness and doubt as well as celebration, while Part II includes recollections of tenderness. That overlap is appropriate to the book’s account of love, though the organizing labels can make the poems seem more neatly categorized than their feelings actually are. The framing Sonnet 30 is also a borrowed work rather than a formal model Sinay consistently develops: the collection generally favors direct address, free verse, and occasional rhyme over sustained engagement with the sonnet form. Shakespeare appears throughout as reference and aspiration, but the poems’ chief interest is biographical immediacy, not formal experiment.

That immediacy has costs. Many poems rely on familiar comparisons—loved ones as sunshine, angels, flowers, or sources of light—and repeat declarations of devotion with little development. “Nancy,” built from paired opposites such as beginning and end, and “My Sunshine Girl” make their affection unmistakable, but their repetition can flatten rather than deepen it. Some early poems also present desire through possessive or objectifying language. “Nature’s Way,” for example, explicitly distinguishes seeking a woman’s “flaming flesh” from seeking her heart; readers may find that candid account of appetite less tender than the collection’s more mutual expressions of love. Elsewhere, the speaker’s intensity can crowd out the other person’s perspective, especially in poems that frame love as needing to be completed by a partner.

The collection’s most serious weakness is its uneven editing. Awkward syntax, inconsistent punctuation, apparent typographical mistakes, and lines that seem corrupted or incomplete repeatedly interrupt the reading. The issue is visible even in poems with strong underlying material: “A Soft White Cloud Called You” shifts into confusing phrasing, while “Two Time Zones” and “The Secret Box” contain grammatical slips that obscure otherwise clear ideas. Several pieces also repeat words or images without an evident artistic purpose. Since the book spans decades and draws on personal documents, some variation in craft is understandable; nevertheless, more careful selection and copyediting would help readers distinguish intentional roughness from error. The opening notice about Church judgments concerning the reported Amsterdam Apparitions, though relevant to a separate research purpose stated in the book, has no apparent connection to the poems and makes for a distracting entrance.

For readers interested in autobiographical poetry, intimate family records, and the persistence of romantic memory, Sinay’s collection offers moments of genuine vulnerability and a strong sense of lived experience. Readers seeking tightly revised, formally adventurous poetry or a consistently fresh treatment of love may find its repetition and editorial lapses frustrating. The book is most rewarding when its personal detail gives familiar emotions a specific shape—especially in “Learning to Love,” “Old Dishes,” and the poems that make beaches, coins, and keepsakes bear the burden of memory. It is best approached as an unvarnished life archive rather than a uniformly polished collection.