Radio and Other Miracles

Chris Knight is copy editor of the National Post in Toronto.

Terrance Cox covers much ground in the 33 poems that make up this debut
collection. He takes the reader from “hardscrabble hundred acres” of
Northern Ontario to Ntcheu, Malawi, “number one in nightlife / hundred
miles in all directions.”

But there are travels in time as well as space. Cox recalls the
miraculous rush of invention and novelty of the mid-20th century—the
day he heard “apogee” and “perigee” on a radio during the first
Mercury spaceshots, “two words I heard / that grade-school day / as
first time ever uttered / to describe an earthling ... adjectives of
astrophysics / applied to human vessel.” Or the pre-CD days of
listening to music, “when penny over stylus solved / dilemmas of dust
and scratches.” In these recollections, he re-creates the wonder we
felt at the new, while reminding us that, at the time, no one knew where
such newness would lead or what it meant. The poem “February 9,
1964,” for instance, recalls, with a decades-late apology, how a
babysitter would not let his charge stay up late enough to see the
Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

The book closes with poems of praise for Duke Ellington, Count Basie,
Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Thelonius Monk, who took space and
time and rolled it up into musical notes, beyond the reach of mere
words. But Cox does as good a job as any of expressing the
inexpressible. The poem “Armstrong’s Cornet” says the instrument
should be placed “next to Einstein’s blackboard / Louis’s device,
no less / instrumental to our planet.”