Music Minus One - Softcover

Shore, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312169442 ISBN 13: 9780312169442

Publisher: Picador, 1997

Synopsis

Comprised of interwoven narratives, Music Minus One begins in 1950s New Jersey, with Jewish-owned shops along a city avenue, the tensions of the Cold War, and Jane Shore's childhood home above her parents' clothing store. The title of this collection refers to a record album that provides orchestral accompaniment for playing a solo instrument at home. Jane Shore's father played the saxophone with the Big Bands of the thirties and forties and figures prominently in this book. With the more intimate music of family life, the author transfigures the emotional dimensions of her childhood into the experience of her own motherhood, life in Vermont, and a memorable elegy for her mother, Essie.

About this title

About the Author

Jane Shore is the author of two previous volumes of poetry: The Minute Hand, which won the Lamont Poetry Selection of the American Academy of Poets, and Eye Level, winner of the Juniper Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and NEA grants among others. She lives in Washington, D.C., and East Calais, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist Howard Norman, and their daughter, Emma.

From Publishers Weekly

Shore's third collection (after Eye Level, winner of the Juniper Prize, and The Minute Hand, winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize) is a virtuoso performance. Working from an autobiographical base, she captures the nuances of an intense childhood lived as if every decision will be crucial for the lives of everyone around her. Many poems focus on laughable recollections?of the stuffed baby chick she was certain gave her chicken pox, of herself, a Jewish child singing a Christmas carol, of herself as a girl in a heat wave, topless in front of her father "for the very last time." Poems probing her transition from child to adult are less strong, but those focusing on motherhood, after the birth of her daughter, are powerful. Some of these poems pair a present image with one from the past with stunning results: her father's death with his teaching her as a child the combination to the safe in his store; her frail, terminally ill mother with the act of of constructing with her own young daughter the Visible Woman model kit. Picador's first volume of poetry is a winning collection.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0312169442
• ISBN 13: 9780312169442
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128