No Eyes

Poet, musician and jazz critic David Meltzer traces a lyric-elegiac narrative of feeling "vulnerable and deep beyond belief" in this sequence of poems on the life of the saxophonist Lester Young. An "inside" biography, tenderly illuminated by vintage photographs of is subject, No Eyes is a brilliant jazz-world evocation, celebrating the hermetic craft-fellowship of those who know "what blowing's all about".Composing in multi-sensory free verse whose flow is arrested to capture significant moments, Meltzer creates a layered narrative of vivid colors and textures, the material facts of Young's story dissolving into internalized, projected truths of erotic understanding and spiritual sympathy with the "sweet and isolate lovely other". Writing-out Young's music from within, Meltzer's gesturing with words catches highs and lows hovering around the notes, discovers ecstasy and pain within and beyond the phrases.Reflecting the sensitivity of one artist's gifts of mind and tongue and heart through another's, No Eyes states an affinity of artisanship "too marvelous for words" in the soul cosmos, a mystical sense of that special contact between lives "inside each other alone together" which music allows.