Paraph of the Bone and Other Kinds of Blue. (Reviews).

Ed Pavlic. Paraph of the Bone & Other Kinds of Blue. Philadelphia: American Poetry Review, 2001. 96 pp. $23.00 cloth/$14.00 paper.

In the liner notes for Miles Davis's groundbreaking 1958 recording Kind of Blue, pianist, arranger, and composer Bill Evans writes: "There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or uninterrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures of changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberations cannot interfere." Evans suggests that the members of the Davis quintet, both collectively and as individuals, succeed in undertaking this sort of spontaneous and improvisational project throughout the album's five tracks. He ultimately claims that the "conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection ... has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz o r improvising musician."

With his first volume of published verse, Paraph of the Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, Ed Pavlic explores the rarified aesthetic space described by Evans. In this award-winning collection, the poet builds upon the benchmark recording sessions of the Davis quintet, as well as the music of Phyflis Hyman, Charlie "Bird" Parker, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Sade, and others. By drawing inspiration and subject matter from the Black music continuum, Pavlic uncovers a fresh set of poetic possibilities that spring from the blues idiom. He devotes attention to its engagement with the frequencies of history, memory, and the texture of the moment itself. These connections are made evident throughout the volume, from its opening poem, "Masqalero," which carries the epigraph "after Miles," to "Sphere," a poem in five parts that is written "after Monk."

In taut, unrhymed triplets Pavlic demonstrates his deep appreciation for and understanding of the Black music continuum. The poems in Paraph of the Bone & Other Kinds of Blue strike the page like the valves of Davis's trumpet. Through their lines, pavlic's readers are plunged into an exploration of the intersections between lived experience and modes of expression. In this way, his poems emerge as Evans's "direct deed"; their disciplined arrangement reveals the poet's feel for language, keen sense of phrasing, and powers of recollection. For instance, in "1955," a seven-part cycle set in the final year of Charlie Parker's life, Pavlic demonstrates his capacity to retrieve the intimate details from the interior spaces recorded by the Blues. The poet makes this clear in the poem's sixth canto when he writes:

I have ever heard these streets whisper
 to little boys. Now I want
  to say, "stick with me

kid, I'll show you how to turn
 a blus velvet side in, clear out
  the Open Door...

This here's the scrappled Apple
 & you better believe every day's Halloween.
  Hand slaps & entropic

hustles won't get you back to New
 Hope or onto any wet-dream
  Bandstand." Now I say.

As an example of jazz poetry, "1955" moves in one direction: straight, no chaser. Pavlic presents his readers with a Parker figure who is, at once, an artist struggling for heightened levels of expression and the stuff of legend. In its detailed exploration of this musician's voice and legacy, Pavlic's poem recalls Michael S. Harper's work with the life and music of John Coltrane in his poems Healing Song for the Inner Ear (1985). Yet, what is also remarkable about the poetry in Paraph of the Bone & Other Kinds of Blue is the way it accesses a Blues-rooted sensibility, even in poems that do not focus directly on musical sources. In "More Here Than Gone," for example, Davis's trumpet work is conjured with the controlled with a captivating, celebratory, and haunting

that smell of tar dust
 & cigar ash. On blushed hips
  of a cushion

rests the cheek of a lover
 that never made the family name.
  Who lived

in an uncle's workday, between intuition
 in a wood rasp & photographic
  contours

Pavlic keeps the Blues essence present throughout the volume; this is assured by his attention to craft and detail. In her introduction to Paraph of the Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, Adrienne Rich remarks on this quality in Pavilc's poetry. Writing after selecting this volume as the winner of The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize for 2001, Rich explains that she was impressed with the collection because, along with "his engagement with [musical] tradition, Ed Pavlic adds an erotics of language, vernacular and mysterious." She continues by asserting that there is not empty display or "showy erudition in Pavlic's [word choices]: they are an extension of poetry." As a result, Pavlic has succeeded in producing a collection of poems which simultaneously interprets the luxurious impulses of the Blues ethos while working within its tradition of spare soundings and cautionary tales. In this way, Ed Pavlic presents his readers with a poetic "both/and" proposition: The poetry in Paraph of the Bone & Other Kinds of Blue is intimately tied to the work of Davis's quintet and other figures from the Black music continuum; at the same time, its verse is as disciplined and directed as Evan's Japanese paintings. In Rich's words, these poems suggest "someone has actually been here." As readers, it is our good fortune that we have their lines to follow.