Music of the Inner Lakes

Ten stories about the transcendence of music; the music of aging, death, and deliverance; the music of paths, rotten logs in the woods, icy lakes; music in the flesh; music as family history; music cellular and ultraviolet, glowing about the bonesmusic as the Oversoul. Within its chosen compass, Sheffers second collection (after (Borrowed Voices, 1990) strikes many different notes, often within a single tale. In Bald Soprano, for example, a chipper, song-loving, yet fading man of 74, who is losing his memory (he can barely remember five minutes past), dresses up in his dead wifes frayed skirt and goes to church on Halloween to play a joke on the choir singers gathered for Friday-evening rehearsal. They dont see him and leave, but he stays behind in a dimly lit pew talking with a bearded stranger he cant quite see, a stranger (Death?) who can sing two octaves below middle C in a bass so low it cant be heard. Where are the choir singers? the stranger asks. Theyre gone. They sang and theyre gone. Gone, as all singers must go. In the title tale, a man who has given up his guitar playing and songwriting after losing two fingertips is miraculously renewed when he hears a genetically twisted, nearly moronic backwoods family from the deepest hills sing some simpleminded throat clutchers that leave him struck with envy. He hikes out to visit them with a woman who lags behind him on the steep path. In her pale flat voice, she sang for a while, alone, and then with other voices. Or it may have been the wind accompanying her, blowing across the hard edges of a well-tuned forest. A yearning, lambent collectionand a balm to music lovers. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.