shakespeare, sonnets

for Ivan Limbakh Publishing, 2010

The design of the book is supposed to reveal my alchemical and cosmological interpretation of Shakespeare’s book of sonnets
(as a counterpoint to a pragmatic and refined approach of the book’s commentator - Sergey Radlov).
There are 14 lines in a sonnet – one half of a moon cycle. The overall number of sonnets — 154 — corresponds to 11 moon months (14x11). The absent 12-th month signifies the supposedly lost poems. Finally the Russian translation doubles the number.
Moon governs change, imagination, dreams, lovers, fertility, vegetation, earth waters, body fluids and guides poets. It is a mystic sky wanderer and ambivalent androgyne.
If the reader thumbs quickly through the pages, he will see an animation of the waning and waxing moon.
End-sheets reveal the map of 154 moon phases.