Amazon.com
Following up their wonderful jazz poetry anthology, editors Sascha Feinstein and Yusuf Komunyakaa deliver the goods again. Derek Walcott, June Jordan, and Gwendolyn Brooks all weigh in with fine poems, but my favorite this go-round is Rita Dove's "Canary," which includes these lines: "Billie Holiday's burned voice / had as many shadows as lights, / a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano, / the gardenia her signature under that ruined face." These images tell a lot of the story of jazz as an art form. Life is painful, but music is solace, catharsis, and transcendence. So is poetry.
From Publishers Weekly
As an augmentation of 1991's Jazz Anthology, the Second Set is as impetuous and bent as a Thelonious Monk song, and, in a fusty, academic sort of way, at least half as enjoyable. It should especially please the jazz culture connoisseur. Feinstein and Komunyakaa, in trying to make up for their first collection's omissions, have created an exquisite mix of poetry, history and personal takes on the literary implications of the musical form. The book tells a unique, intertwined history of jazz and poetry, embracing poets as diverse as Hart Crane, Ntozake Shange, Rita Dove, William Matthews and Lorenzo Thomas. In all, about 100 mostly contemporary poets are included. As a group, their poems exhibit certain be-bop qualities: throughout, we get jarring, overshot allusions to musicians, writers and songs, as well as a building, panoramic retrospective of jazz greats like Monk, Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Billie Holiday. The editors have most certainly achieved their goal of inspiring "engaging discussions on the nature of jazz poetry."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
