Crowd of Sounds: Poems

Once in a long while a lyric poet comes along whose technique, emotional pitch, and intellect combine in sublime balance and take poetry to a new level. Witness Adam Sol. Sol’s work is exhilarating in its range. Here he is gentle and mournful, attuned to his surroundings, and suddenly over here he mounts a sneak attack and hits us with erotic joy, erotic 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 jay, wasp, streetcar, busker, and lover’s breath, 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.