MARTY SAUNDERS Poems of Wild Music

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

reveals that, in moments of suffering, music can be a salve for sorrow—it can transform pain into a pleasure so good we have the strength to face death.

The scope of these poems often turns outwards as well, gazing beyond the lives of their speakers to study the way music inhabits public spaces. Here is “Donut Shop Jukebox”:

Each morning Willis plays checkers with Eddie, the meth addict 40 days clean … Inside it smells of coffee and sugar, the Shirelles singing Baby It’s You and someone taps on the fogged up window, late for work, needing jumper cables. In the fields beyond where the ditch runs with water the star thistle opens its stunned furry leaves, dry needles jabbing the air.

I like the engine roaring to life, a savage red dogwood shedding its flowers over the sidewalk, over the fence. I like your hat with its purple feather, cheap as a melody, cheap as a wish.

People play checkers while they listen to music, they have coffee and doughnuts. Oftentimes this is what music is, the background to which we live our lives. But penetrating this poem is a subtle recognition that music is not made only by singers and instruments—the poem acknowledges the beauty of common sounds, like tapping on the glass or an engine roaring as it is turned on. This serves as a reminder that our ears are always tuned. That the bees are music, too. The soundtrack of the world is always playing—all we need to do is listen.

The poems in this chapbook offer up an honest, no-frills view of what life gives us: pain, humor, sensuality, and song. They are driven by narrative and anchored in deep emotion. For those who have never bought a chapbook, Duet is the place to start. It’s short enough to read in one sitting. Small enough to carry with you. Once you read these poems, their lines and images will ring in your head like the words to your favorite song. You will find the type of poetry you can take with you wherever you go.