Mr. Pavlic has listened closely to our most profound American art, the blues and jazz, and that music has not only helped him achieve poetic form but allowed him to explore a mesh of experience extraneous to literary theories. He is, doubtless, aware of such theories, but the voices in his poems flow from a denser space, having penetrated a denser reality, returning via the imagination and its many discontents. In many of them, music and its creation/performance are metaphorized into human relationships. This is intimate and soulful work, breathing, brushing, or tonguing its instrument. --Adrienne Rich