Speculative Music
Poems
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Jeff Dolven’s poems take the guise of fables, parables, allegories, jokes, riddles, and other familiar forms. So, there is an initial comfort: I remember this, the reader thinks, from the stories of childhood . . . . But wait, something is off. In each poem, an uncanny conceit surprises the form, a highway paved with highwaymen, a school for shame, a family of chairs. Dolven makes these strange wagers with the grace and edgy precision of a metaphysical poet, and there are moments when we might imagine ourselves to be somewhere in the company of Donne or Spenser. Then we encounter “The Invention: A Libretto for Speculative Music,” which is, well—surreal, and features a decisively modern, entirely notional score, sung by an inventor and his invention, which (who?) turns out to be a 40s-type piano-perched chanteuse who (which?) somehow knows all the words to the song you never knew you had in you. The daring of this collection is not in replaying the fractured polyphony of our moment. Speculative Music gives us accessible lyrics that still manage to listen in on our echoing interiors. These are poems that promise Frost’s “momentary stay against confusion” and, at the same time, provoke a deep, head-shaking wonder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This debut is, on one hand, a bag of tricks and conceits, wherein the speaker playful, dishonest, and a tad morose moves his way through the rooms of ordinary life with a bent of vision just-so off normal. On the other, it's a book of simple, highly accessible verse, even if the turns Dolven takes surprise and jitter. These 38 poems (and one short libretto) are by those turns jokes, fables and proverbs, stories and anecdotes, and, most of all, tricks of narrative, where Dolven's unmistakable self-questioning, dark-humored voice can't help but often shine through. Often the reader is addressed directly: "Don't be na ve. The poem is my hand how your mouth moves like that when you read." "I do hope you find this interesting." And just as often, Dolven moves to larger statements, exhibiting an existential darkness that can be either humorous "and here's the thing, the telephone./ You say you're coming? Hear, hear!/ You say you're leaving? There there./ I still can't hear you damn this thing // Hello? Hello? Am I still there?" or dead serious: "Each thing makes its own wild cry./ Who thought, so many kinds of throat. / Under pressure all confess/ I never knew what I was for."
