Poem About Music:

A book-length poem with the rhythms of Don Cherry and John Chicai and the vision of Charles Olson, all held in tension against silence.


A Forest Utilization Family:

The "forest poems" are derived from a dictionary of forestry, mostly by elision, giving the words their margin of silence which is also their source.



"Poem About Music is a booklength poem where the tension and repose is controlled by an exaggerated use of white space: a technique suggestive of the silences in music. It is a poem like the music it is about, in that it is open to various interpretations while at the same time its aesthetics can be appreciated without paraphrasing comment."

--L.W.Kimmel, Select Press Review


"Words can talk directly to us, they do so in Poem About Music.... The operations of language in this amaze me by their delicacy, suitability and delightfulness. I think at once of Louis Zukofsky or Jeremy Prynne when I read this book. It leaves me feeling contented.... This book is most openly concerned with language and its source, which is just silence. Track down an empty page to an ellipsis: it is filled, given a body and definition by the words that pass forwards and backwards from it ... something to delight in."

--Peter Philetterpressott, Great Works


"We are forced back to a singular reading in a new grammar, which is to read the words only as themselves ... the word that, said, stays."

--Peter Riley, Grosseteste Review


"These short, incisive poems take B's achievement a whole stage further: engaging with contemporary dislocations of life and consciousness, they expose paradox without imposing made answers upon the possible."

--Taxus