Liberation of Dissonance: Poems

by Bruce Bond

Overview

With its finely honed language and interweaving of free-verse couplets, poet and musician Bruce Bond has returned us to the world of structure and form as the framework for this profound exploration of dissonance in music, in art, in our lives and its underlying power to restore meaning and hope in a chaotic world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639640003
Publisher:	Schaffner Press Inc
Publication date:	07/01/2022
Pages:	92
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-eight books including, most recently, Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), Scar (Etruscan, 2020), Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, Criterion Books), The Calling (Parlor, 2021), and Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including seven editions of Best American Poetry. Presently he teaches part-time as a Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas and performs classical and jazz guitar in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Table of Contents

Preface Donald Revell vii

I.

Verklärte Nacht 1

Lamella 4

Gródek 7

Wolves 9

Bells 11

For Tim Whom None Can Find 14

Wozzeck 16

Lorca 19

II.

Measure 23

III.

The Octaves 35

Wave 41

Syrinx 42

Siren 45

Cry 47

Body 49

Phoenix 52

The Throat Singers of Tuva 55

IV.

Beethoven 61

Monk 65

Blackbird 67

Stranger 70

Cloud Chamber 72

Zither 75

Bach 78

The Arctic Variations 79

Acknowledgments 85

Editorial Reviews

07/18/2022

The illusory and atmospheric latest from Bond (Blackout Starlight) tackles the theme of dissonance in music as a metaphor for the secrets of life, death, and the cosmos. In “Lamella,” a woman playing the oboe at a wedding as the bride walks down the aisle echoes the harvesting of mushrooms in southern France, the scenes juxtaposed for their delicate instruments: the reed, “the thin resilient tip that, when sounded, vanishes from view,” and the mushroom’s fragile construction, “Beneath the brim of the cap, the mushroom’s papery fan/ broke to pieces at my touch. It crumpled the way bodies do/ beneath a shared diagnosis.” Many poems address historical figures and events with multifaceted sensitivity. Bond is particularly skilled at interpreting sounds of nature through a musical lens; he writes of wolves howling, “It sounded honeyed at first, the binding of the voices// the way they bleed like sirens into echoes, echoes/ into the silence to come.” Written entirely in couplets, Bond’s form suits the subject matter with expert, lulling rhythms. This is a captivating ode to the power of music and the unnoticed melodies that mark the tempos of daily life. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"Bruce Bond is one of generation's best poets."

Laura Kasischke

"A moving tribute to the power of music and the sensual life of the mind."

Dorianne Laux

"No poet writes about music better than Bruce Bond, and there are not many who can, poem after poem, combine such lucidity with such lyrical intensity"

(on Bond's previously published book, "Blind Rain")

Stephen Dunn

"The world's first drum was nothing we would call / a drum/ Nothing, that is, until we heard it," writes Bruce Bond, a poet whose work I have read and loved for many years. There is music, in Bond's poems, that is like no one else's. It is both beautifully traditional, and yet innovative, because it responds to the metaphysics of his moment, to the heart of our day. Bruce Bond is a brilliant and true poet, I am glad for every new reader of his works."

Ilya Kaminsky