Winter Jazz

David E. Kemp, a former drama professor at Queen’s University, is the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Joseph Maviglia is the author of two critically acclaimed books of
poetry, Movietown and A God Hangs Upside Down. He is also a
singer-songwriter who has performed poetry and music at the National
Gallery of Canada, the Bohemian Embassy, the Free Times Cafe, and the
Bamboo Club.

Maviglia’s poetry demands to be read aloud. Only then do phrases like
“the slow unlying navigation from honeymoon to sink” (from
“Navigation”) truly come alive. One can imagine these poems being
narrated to music, although their vivid lyrical style is such that they
are music in themselves. Maviglia explores contrasts—morning and
evening, restoration and decay, the loved and the lonely, and the
beautiful and the deformed—in poetry that can be likened to jazz,
simultaneously raw and soothing. Each poem recalls a fugue in which a
theme is developed and interwoven until its very essence has been
deconstructed.