High Notes

By Lois Roma-Deeley

Poetry. With its many thematic riffs and harmonic phrasings, Lois Roma-Deeley's newest collection of poems invites the reader into the shadowy jazz scene of the late 1950s, where music and language fuse into a road of longing and desire. This book won the Benu Press Samuel T. Coleridge Prize. Benu Press awards The Samuel T. Coleridge Prize for "an outstanding work of literature, written by a contemporary author, that fulfills Coleridge's vision of the artist as a reconciling architect of the imagination. Such a work reconfigures our understanding of the world to establish new meaning in a future transformed by hope."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0981516394
• ISBN13: 9780981516394
• Release Date: April 2010
• Publisher: Benu Press
• Length: 67 Pages

Customer Reviews

Uses verse and lyric to paint the soul of the period

Music is all too often the product of pain. "High Notes" is a collection of poetry focusing on the jazz scene of the 1950s, as award winning poet Lois Roma-Deeley uses verse and lyric to paint the soul of the period, a time where a clean Jazz musician was not something that happened. "High Notes" is a fascinating read, and is not to be ignored. "Retreat for a Blue Monk": Say it is a child's wish, this wanting and wail:/to be captured by the snare drum; to pass through/the snapping jaw of brass cymbals;/to slide down the throat of a horn-/head over bent knees - to live inside the trumpet's stomach--/where, after a mighty heave, I am reborn/with a caul and blue beret.