Name	Rich Sommer
Height
Naionality	American
Date of Birth	February 2, 1978
Place of Birth	Toledo, Ohio
Famous for

Born, raised, and educated in Minnesota, USA, he attended Harvard University before coming to Canada in 1962 to teach at Concordia University, Montreal. When he retired, Sommer became increasingly interested in environmental and conservation issues. He led the fight to preserve Pinnacle Mountain, Quebec, as a natural habitat rather than as its planned use as a ski resort. This conflict and his eventual victory is documented in an nfb movie, The Poet and the Pinnacle (1995).

Sommer has published eight volumes of poetry, including Blue sky notebook (1973), The other side of games (1977), Selected and new poems (1984), Fawn bones (1986), and The shadow sonnets (1992). A constant theme of much of his poetry is one of placing himself inside reality to experience and then report any events impinging on the self that, as he states in one of his sonnets, ‘is all we really have.’ Irony flickers through the poems, the figure of the poet inside the poems seen in all his uncertainties and faults as well as his joys and contentments. He expresses the external world directly as he lets irony surround his responses to that reality.

Much of Sommer's concern for the life of nature and the violent inroads made on it figures in his collection Fawn bones. His poetic voice has remained consistent, though he has moved to a more open language, trying to merge directness, the colloquial, and the inwardly musing sides of his character. This is particularly true of The shadow sonnets, a collection of one hundred poems using the form to record a wide range of personal experiences, both painful and joyous. As he suggests in one of the sonnets, ‘the sonnet's form is of our suffering/yet blesses, heals, accepts our offering.’ He retains a firm hold on the intricacies of rhyme and rhythm, though many of the sonnets jostle and pull at the constraints as he juggles with slant rhyme and expanded rhythms. This worrying at the form creates an added tension to the poetry.

Read more: Richard Sommer Biography - (b. 1934), The Poet and the Pinnacle, Blue sky notebook, The other side of games http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/8722/Richard-Sommer.html#ixzz0isdUUxH5