Crowd of Sounds

Once in a long while a lyric poet comes along whose technique, emotional pitch, and intellect combines in sublime balance and takes poetry to a new level. Witness Adam Sol. His work is exhilarating in its range. He is gentle and mournful, attuned to his surroundings, then suddenly mounts a sneak attack and hits us with erotic joy, threat, history, elegy, comic absurdity, and acts of disturbing ventriloquism; somehow stitching it all together with a tightly scored thematic coherence. For once our eyes are not our first concern, Sol writes, and in poem after poem, as he conducts, he awakens our listening. These poems are about music but they are also about the silence it breaks, and the inevitable recurrence of that silence.