Variations in an Emergency
by Anne Lovering Rounds

Description

Featuring a cover image by Robert Motherwell and distantly inspired by the structure of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Variations in an Emergency is a poetic sequence about the way longing and loss recur: in conversations, dreams, and disparate city spaces. Resonant with literary and musical allusion, these 32 short lyric poems bear witness to the fact some memories, encounters, and desires repeat but never resolve.

Comments:

“Bach, Schumann, and Orpheus before them, as well as Frank O’Hara, San Francisco, and always and again New York City—these are some of the voices and places that haunt this marvelous debut collection of poems from Anne Lovering Rounds. As with a pianist’s knowing fingers, she plays her own variations on the great aria of human loss, one touch at a time, ever delicate, ever urgent.”(Scott Burnham, author of Mozart’s Grace)

“Music is the abiding presence in Anne Lovering Rounds’ Variations in an Emergency: not in the usual sense of lush rhetoric but in the sense of resonance, the reverberation of words and phrases packed with implication and suggestion. Much of what is powerful in these poems is what their concentrated music leaves unspoken. And much of what is musical comes from the poems’ involvement with real music and musicians, from Bach and Schumann to John Lennon, whose remembered sound presides over the cycle of poetic variations.” (Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music, Fordham University)

“With these poems Anne Lovering Rounds opens up a richly allusive world of real and imagined places, real and imagined dreams. Here are poems that call out to be listened to.” (Lawrence Zbikowski, Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago)