Music from Words

Music from Words is a stunning first collection of poems that ranges from the elegiac to the experimental. It captures the spirit of Modernists and the emotion of jazz in a music all its own. Music from Words begins with the charm of a master poet recreating stories of men or women just before a crisis begins or ends, at a precarious equipoise before a moment of change. Some are famous, others ordinary people. A modern-day Moses sees the burning bush in the suburbs. Gilgamesh is caught in a traffic jam. A former Whiz Kid game show contestant dissolves into psychosis. Hugo Ball, one of the founders of the Dada movement, sells his wife to soldiers. All of the characters come alive in verse, their stories echoing moments of ecstasy, tragedy, irony and comedy. Mr. Jampole creates some of the deepest feeling people you will ever meet. Then, slowly, section by section, Mr. Jampole begins his riff. He cycles into poems of protest and loss. He echoes Coltrane and Charles Ives in his melodic range. His work is a subversion of confessional conventionalism: his celebrations of self are much more carefully abstract, until the reader cannot fathom if they are celebrations of self or retellings of the Everyman myth. The poems will surprise you, because they thoroughly examine life and ideas in new ways. For example, he riffs on a love song by directing a speaker's affections to a woman in a Seurat painting. Stylistic play, iconoclastic form, heightened imagination – Music from Words is a sensitive and astonishing first collection.