Brian David Scates

It was the precise title of the extremely beautiful song 'Superstar' with its emotional sense of absence and love possibly returning sung by Karen Carpenter of 'The Carpenters' that inspired these sonnets written for Kathleen Curran. Like Karen, Kathleen Curran died tragically young. Karen's exquisite voice will itself travel to the stars with Mankind. Karen Carpenter is also by association remembered in these sonnets. In these emotionally formed rather than traditionally formed sonnets Kathleen Curran - in literary metaphor- symbolically explodes as a superstar and then because of its own gravity implodes into a Black Hole of Enigma - meaning here death - in which anything may happen. Knowledge of what happens within black holes is unknown. So within imagination Kathleen and Karen may still exist within an alternative reality. I might add that the first line of each sonnet is based on a line or part of a first line of a sonnet written by William Shakespeare. This is a 2nd edition of "Star Sonnets for Kathleen Curran 1989". There are a limited number of 1st editions still for sale but these do not mention Karen Carpenter like the 2nd edition does.

Courageous poems of love, loss, rage, despair and renewal from a writer who has experienced a lifetime of bi-polar and mixed affective illness.