Musica Transalpina - Tapa blanda

"This is Michelene Wandor's best book yet. She combines her erudtion and passion as poet, musician and scholar in a collection that gives immense pleasure, and also continually challenges the reader with the force and variety of its ideas." Alan Brownjohn"

VI give me time I said and note my grace in loving you let me divide and ornament you touch you above and below circle around your key note enter your fifth dimension and perfect your cadence let me feel your greater and lesser thirds modulate your modes and minor your majors VII I want to trill your renaissance way beginning sure and supreme on your given, written note and flirt my way across distance to the note above taking you into history with me in dissonance Michelene Wandor's new poetry collection excels in the richness of its subject matter, the witty and sensuous language, the musicality of its rhythms and the way in which she is able to combine sophistication with accessibility. She is as comfortable with Italian Renaissance music as she is with the poignancy of the history of Europe's Jewish populations. Her retelling of the "Book of Esther" is a tour de force of Midrashic free-form poetry, and her speculation on Shakespeare's "Dark Lady of the Sonnets" is a tribute to both Elizabethan poetry and a mischievous imagination.