Riffs

Bruce Meyer teaches English at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

Riffs is a strange blend of the atonal and the melodic. It offers the
insinuation of jazz in the title, and it delivers just that: the jasser
or almost personal gossip of the relationship between a man and a woman,
an internal monologue where erotic experiences become brief, subtle
meditations, snippets of sensation and thought and reconsideration that
are struggling to add up to an understanding of love.

Jazz aficionados will be surprised. The poems in Riffs read like
someone playing 10 seconds of a Miles Davis track and then picking up
the needle and moving on to the next cut. They don’t last long enough.
And, of course, they shouldn’t. A riff is a brief jazz statement, a
slightly developed melody; yet there is not enough of the melody in this
collection. And those who go looking for it will find it hot—more
Ornette Coleman than Sonny Rollins. What implies brevity often elicits a
feeling of truncation, a dissonance that for all its attempts at bluesy
referentiality becomes increasingly difficult and enigmatic and cryptic
(not quite self-indulgent) as the collection progresses. The final poem
in the series offers a glimpse of the poetic spirit that was so evident
in Lee’s finest poems from his previous collections—Civil Elegies,
Sibelius Park, and The Gods.