The Voices

One of the main themes is the essential presence of music and music-making in the world; “I would never go into the dark without the voices,” as the title poem says. The book also includes a number of elegies for departed family members and friends in balance with poems that celebrate existence—“love your life,” as the final (wedding) poem insists. The epigraph at the beginning of the book suggests the way we all must live in contradiction.