Radio & Other Miracles - Tapa blanda

"In this marvelously sustained evocation of pre-TV, aural culture, Terrance Cox has crafted a style that operates as the poetic equivalent of pop, rock and jazz idioms--an elegant, retro telegraphese that has, everywhere, the nostalgic feel of the bygone, of that now legendary era that has passed into history." --George Amabile "These poems remind the reader of what connects and what divides. They begin in pop culture iconography of western experience and move through what becomes a cultural incongruity as Elvis and Eric sing and play our lives on an African juke box. They give us a sense of ourselves as privileged adolescents with much to celebrate and much to atone. We visit where people "too poor for bar-price alcohol" open their hearts with welcome. The reader dances the moral, sings the themes, bends an elbow to the hard truth and listens closely to catch the song as it arrives with the lovely static of a cheap radio of a 1950's childhood or in the all too familiar snowy images of early television. These poems bring us the news of our life and its ironies, reminding us that sometimes only when we drift out of focus do we truly see or hear what's there. As Cox writes, "picture perfect/no songs." How long might we look at Einstein's blackboard or listen to the soundtrack of our lives before we realize what the world wants to teach us isn't always what we learn. If we listen closely to Cox's poems, we might well learn what the world is saying with the voice of Billie Holiday and the horn of Thelonious Monk." --John B. Lee

In this book, the miracle of radio opens a boy's ears to the music of the world around him. In poems that range in setting from Canada to Africa and the Middle East, Cox tells of "other miracles" as well--sailboats and spaceships, ice-skates and tropical jacaranda, hair-raising escapes from danger, and the eerie harmony of coincidence. Fans will be glad to see Cox's tributes to Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and other jazz greats collected here.