Hard Candy

Frazer continuedfrom previous page his colleagues during the interviews. His "What About Monk?" essay says more in one page about Monk's contributions to jazz than most Monk biographies. Lacy calls Monk "the searchlight (beacon) of the bebop revolution." In the interviews, Lacy's account of Monk as a congenial mentor instead of a reclusive eccentric stands as a landmark revelation in jazzjournalism . Lacy's essay on Taylor's introducing him to the work of Stravinsky segues into an appreciation of the uniqueness of the Russian composer's thinking and orchestrating. Weiss's selections reveal Lacy as an articulate writer. Nothing in Lacy's writing, however , suggests that he aspired to be a poet, himself. Lacy loved literature and music, and regarded them as "languages" capable of communicating together. In fusing together his portrait ofLacy, Weiss has ensured a substantial measure of accuracy through choosing material in which Lacy communicates in Detailfrom cover his own words (and notations). Weiss's commentary reveals a deep interest and dedicated research into Lacy's life and work. A Lacy aficionado might question why Weiss describes Phase Two as "a New York coffeehouse" since several available sources state that Lacy recorded School Days there during an extended 1963 engagement. A passing reference to poet-painter Brion Gysin as "Beat" overstates Gysin's affiliation with Beat Generation writers other than William Burroughs. Other than these minor matters, the book appears to be accurate in its details. Steve Lacy: Conversations is a notable work that deepens our understanding of a jazz legend whose reputation in the United States derived from fragmentary bulletins published infrequently in Americanjazz magazines. Aside from being a must-read for people who follow Lacy's music, Steve Lacy: Conversations will also help to illuminate Lacy's place in the jazz canon. Vernon Frazer is a writer-musician. Hard Candy Anna Maria Hong Inch Aeons Nuala M. Archer Les Figues http://www.lesfigues.com 105 pages; paper, $15.00 Hard candy. That's what Nuala Archer's new collection of poems. Inch Aeons, made me think of. There's a tough, tart brightness to the poems in the collection, as well as a juxtaposition of stylistic flavors that recalls the paradoxical pleasures of sucking on sour balls. This impression is compounded by the collection's consisting entirely of haiku, the most compact and elusively satisfying of traditional forms. Mostly following the old 5-7-5 syllabic constraints of the form, Archer makes good use of the haiku's terseness to explore larger themes,· which really are quite huge. In the first section, "How Far," she starts us offwith musings on the Big Bang, which she dryly characterizes as a bit of a letdown: Beyond Conception— Without Regeneration— Big Bang's Leave let Be. The touch here is loose, with the nine haiku working by imagistic and musical association, mimicking the presumably prechoate state ofthings surrounding the moment of cosmic explosion. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Archeremploys disjointed language to demonstrate the feeling ofdramatic change and its results. Although these opening poems are too attenuated to be compelling in themselves, they set in motion the idea of catastrophe as creation, which casts a creepy celestial glow over the poems that follow. The eponymous second section, "Inch Aeons," consists of longer, more experimental variations on the haiku form. Here, Archer builds upon the tension between compression and expansion that she established in the Big Bang haiku. This tension also is encapsulated in the oxymoronic title. An aeon is an extremely long period oftime, longer than an era—so vast that it's difficult for the human mind to fathom, much less endure. An inch, of course, is a very small unit of distance, and, as a verb, to inch means to move very slowly, like a worm (one ofthe book's recurring motifs). Together, the two words imply glacial progress , and while the title certainly alludes to the global concerns established in "How Far," it also refers to a more personal event: a traumatic car accident Archer suffered in June of 1995, which subsequently required years of physical therapy. Archer directly evokes this experience in the poem "Kar-ai!-a: June 19, 1995," which...