Part ancient Greek chorus, part Southern Baptist revival, Songs for Two Voices is an explosive showcase for Bruce Smith's jazz-like variations on sonnets and couplets, offering twenty-five duets: poems of call and response, song and countersong. In poems that groove and break, shimmy and dance, Smith filters his Milcs Davis-like riffs through a post-World War II American sensibility to deliver verse without platitudes. As Smith's speakers wander through the detritus of American materialism - encountering jazz, football, drag, class war, Reaganomics, and Vietnam - the poems dramatize the contradictions and peculiarities of growing up male in Cold War America, both sensing promise and suffering disillusion. Each poem here speaks in two voices: one that attacks and one that cowers, one voice that leads while the other follows. But Smith's subjects are unencumbered by form, and their voices blossom in duet: the idealized lover is also a betrayer, the man is also a girl. These binaries of statement and contradiction give birth to a third voice in the unrcalized possibilities of the two.
A mesmerizing follow-up to 2000's The Other Lover, Smith's Songs for Two Voices is carnal yet fiercely intellectual, laid out with the self-confidence of a poet who can invoke Mozart and Coltrane, Anna Akhmatova and John Wayne, Teddy Roosevelt and Augustine in the same incendiary breath.
- ISBN10 0226764559
- ISBN13 9780226764559
- Publish Date 15 April 2005
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Chicago Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 72
- Language English
- URL http://wiley.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9780226764559