MARTY SAUNDERS
Duet: Poems of Wild Music Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar. Duet. Durham, North Carolina. Jacar Press, 2017. $12, paper. Chapbooks are attractive objects. Duet numbers fewer than twenty pages, small enough to slip into a pocket as you head out for the day, so slim you’ll forget it’s with you. Then, in a moment of need—on the bus, in line at the grocery store, or stuck in traffic—you can take the chapbook out and be transported. Duet will explode in your hands. Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar’s poems of musical contemplation and celebration brim with sharp images. They contain honest portraits of the self and the world we inhabit, alongside the songs and musicians the poets have cherished throughout their lives. The chapbook covers a lot of territory, exploring topics and figures like Cher and Paul Simon, the day Lightnin’ Hopkins returned home, and Dolly Parton’s breasts. Singing back to the stars, Millar and Laux pay homage to the music they have lived their lives to. Many poems explore the relationship between musician and audience, how music affects our lives and impacts our inner worlds. Here is “Music My Rampart”: I can point to the exact place in my chest where James Taylor’s voice reverberates. I have no defense against that tenor, those minor keys. It rushes through the aisles of my body like a priest on dope, trailing smoke, his crucifix caught in the folds of his robe … … There are nights I jerk awake as if the phone had rung. But there’s no sound except the refrigerator humming, the joists creaking in the cold. I watch moonlight move across the wall and it’s as if I could touch my own sadness, the rooms flung with filaments that loom in the pockets of my closed eyes. There’s no accounting for it. I open my mouth and sing Sweet Baby James. I cross my hands over my breasts like a woman who is happy to die. The speaker reflects on how we carry our favorite songs inside of us, showing how they shape the landscape of our hearts. The poem 96 | Raleigh Review