Labors Lost Left Unfinished

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