cover image Discography

Discography

Sean Singer. Yale University Press, $12.95 (96pp) ISBN 978-0-300-09363-6

This year's Yale Younger Poet is a young man with a record collection. In Sean Singer's Discography, aggressively up-to-date techniques (some of which suggest Mark Levine or Dean Young) evoke and analyze Afro-American music from early blues recordings (""My hair is black and glossy but I am not Bessie Smith"") to John Coltrane. In Singer's two-part ode to a piano, ""Eternity begins with springs, hammers & felt."" Other sides of this thematically varied collection examine a character named, punningly, ""Singer,"" or take up the poet's own sentiments (including guilt) about his Jewish identity: one highlight (singled out by judge W. S. Merwin) is a ""Poem with Groucho Marx Refrains.""