The Music Makers

Short lyrics and sketches of emergence, whose signatures are a startling precocity of taste, judgment and reticence. The poems are organized in four sections or cantos under headings of musical direction, here indicating narrative markings and precise emotional and intellectual registers: Da Capo, from the head; Lontano, as from a distance; Adagio, at ease; Cadence, a falling. These are urban poems, poems of streetscapes and street people, of movement and light, of the anonymous and disinterested gaze, variously reminiscent of Baudelaire, Eliot, St Vincent Millay. A first collection of surprising strength and authority.