Customer Reviews

Blues for Bird

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4 star:		(1)
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This bird plays a saxophone. He's Charlie "Bird" Parker, virtuoso, pure-souled devotee of his art, incorrigible drunk and wastrel, hero, the stuff human contradictions are made of. Read here about Bird: his sad life of struggle, his incomparable gifts as a performer, his musicianship, his place in a passionate fellowship of black musicians. Gray writes it all down in a sequence of short poems, all cast in the same measure - his version of the classical trimeter. Three beats to the line; but the rhythms weave round the beat like a jazzman's improvisations. Try this: He played all colors too -/ orange yellow green/ all forty shades of blue/ as if he played this for/ every blue there was./ Red may raise the heart/ and green redeem the world/ especially in spring/ but blue expresses soul,/ the hunger each of us/ has for the her or him/ who rests there deep within/ making of each a whole.

How can you write an epic today when the world is no longer 'story-shaped'? You can go back and translate 'Beowulf', as Seamus Heaney, has done, or you can be like Martin Gray and write an epic life in quantum bursts of three-stress energy.

Somebody ought to make a bunch of CDs, with an actor reading these highly accessible poems against a backdrop of Charlie Parker's music. They'd be a wow!

Great book! This book, Blues for Bird, is worth all the other biographies of Charlie Parker combined. A concise and direct evocation of the jazzman's life, it tells the tragic story of his rise and fall, and the tragic decline of his later years--it censors nothing, it tells the story better than a more detailed biographical volume, And does it with a poet's ear and eye! Alright! Be-bop!

Great book! This book, Blues for Bird, is worth all the other biographies of Charlie Parker combined. A concise and direct evocation of the jazzman's life, it tells the tragic story of his rise and fall, and the tragic decline of his later years--it censors nothing, it tells the story better than a more detailed biographical volume, And does it with a poet's ear and eye! Alright! Be-bop!

How can you write an epic today when the world is no longer 'story-shaped'? You can go back and translate 'Beowulf', as Seamus Heaney has done, or you can be like Martin Gray and write an epic life in quantum bursts of three-stress energy.