Bluest Hour, by Tobias A. Ryan

Bluest Hour is a collection of sonnets. The word “sonnet” is from the Middle English word denoting a “song or ballad”. This poetry form capture my attention when I was very young. It is the most popular form of poetry in the English language as we know it. From the time of the Great Vowel Shift, just before William Shakespeare began writing, the sonnet has been a poem of 14 lines. Sonneteers from many corners of Europe, most notably Shakespeare, wrote beautiful sonnets.

Bluest Hour is the product of several years of work while I was in graduate school. I was determined to link my creative and my scientific work, and my first idea was to match writing about psychology with writing stories and poems. As I wrote my thesis and dissertation, I worked for the first time at writing sonnets. In 2007, I published my dissertation along with a group of sonnets for a book with the working title “Twenty-One Wooden Stairs”. While I finished residency and earned my licenses to practice in Oregon and Washington State, I preferred to pair the demands of work with creative writing. I formed a music group, "Outside Voices”, and wrote and recorded several albums of music. In 2018, the idea of self-publishing attracted my interest, and I put together a collection of my sonnets with the title “The Bluest Hour”, planning only to give copies to family and close friends. Using a pseudonym taken from a street in my father’s neighborhood, and I made my first book of poems. When the opportunity to publish in hard-back form came in 2024, I decided to reissue the book for sale to all readers.

Buy on Amazon