Hearing Things and Other Arts

<p class=ql-align-justify>In this book of poems collages and short inquiries the poet wonders about the source of his voices questioning those talking in the dreamlife in the invisible world all around us though he suspects the dream only continues in all of our conversations. How far can his work take him if like Alice his queries only encourage the paradox as if our friends too were those mad characters making and changing the rules with authority? Has the poet become a timid version of the monster in a folk song an individual whom the town must carefully subdue enlisting Pete Seeger and his banjo and the child with the magic wand? Can he find Peace with Sgt. Pepper's Band and the beautiful old baseball cards of the minor leagues made in the time of his grandfather the Polish tailor or will Apollinaire's Parisian example prevail?</p><p class=ql-align-justify>Do the voices arise from a kind of divine gossip which we all create and hear accidentally or not while the dreams reveal our alliances each night? The chance operations of the poet's serpentine collages picture lost circles of dream lives hiding strange tasks and arrangements in the wide world without a known religion behind them. Something needs fixing though at the center and the poet is getting tired out and a little mad at us though he attempts to be courteous like honest Alice. Someone could be fooling him and who are the demons and angels of surveillance? Who is taking notes in the tower near the fields of lentils?</p><p class=ql-align-justify>Making his world into a book may have been futile after all these years for this older poet but still where privacy and dreams overlap maybe others will find something charming in his work following along with curiosity. Is he reluctantly saying goodbye to his mother and the old world she helped make welcoming the joy of belonging? As we read to the end we may wonder if we are skeptical whether this poet will ever know exactly what he has gotten himself into but we have his book to hold onto now and read again perhaps thinking about all the questions that can't be answered and how our own imaginations work.</p><p><br></p>