Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong - Softcover

You'll find sundry sorts of life that touch Andrew and you as well, in all sorts of verse: brief or long, quick or deep, free or meter, filled with experience. What s more, you may well want to speak them to family and friends. his last poem s last line tells us verses did what verses mean to do . --John Felstiner

Andrew Shields is maestro of the sympathetic and the savvy. He writes with unapologetic lyricism and with a narrative self-awareness that is anymore too rare in contemporary poetry. The poems in the volume are entirely composed and I intend that word in all the ways one might employ it: composed in the manner of a piece of music, composed in the way one might describe someone as being emotionally pulled together. The simple stoicism of Sundowning will break your heart; Blackbird is a masterwork. everything about this collection sings. --Jill Alexander Essbaum

Poetry. Music. When Thomas Hardy listens to Louis Armstrong, music reaches out to poetry across centuries and oceans. Here, a "dreamer at a loss" passes notes to a classmate, "cards of absolute equivocation" that "run through all the scales in all the keys," from "a man of many hats" to Osip Mandelstam's tambourine, from the dream of a monk to a broken traffic light.