Torch songs, ballads, & lullabys in the heart’s smoke-filled back-room, these beautiful poems by Michael Price are loaded with lyric echoes of Wyatt, Campion, or maybe Andrew Marvell, thus furthering that poetic tradition into the 21st Century situational ethics of the windswept Colorado this poet calls home. “There is a healthy / Dependence on truth / And love’s nameless / Dream,” he says, and he means it. But “her voice from below / crawled into my dark mood / and took up home where the mystery / of feeling normal continually / plays Judas to my Steve McQueen”. There’s no other poet I know that can pull off the old switcheroo like that. Price has the chops, the know-how, and an ear so finely tuned to the lucid ambiguities inherent in the American language, that it is simply dazzling. It is a true pleasure to experience his poetry as it plays out upon the page.
Gypsy & Poet is available right now, direct from Blue Press. What are you waiting for?
