Poems for Two Violins

Poems for Two Violins by Joseph Roccasalvo exhibits a striking talent for the formal style in poetry. The collection is masterful for employing rhyme, meter, and the wordplay of puns and paradox. In the celebration of love in mysticism, romance, and abiding friendship, the poems are subtle and emotional, complex but always comprehensible. They are so overtly musical that the tag, poetically Bach, best describes them. They share that composer's gift for point and counterpoint in their symmetry and precision of choice. The playful wit, conspicuous in the spiritual poems, would captivate even the most secular reader. Poems for Two Violins will inspire both poets and lovers who have a zest for rhyme and meter.

A native New Yorker, Joseph Roccasalvo followed his graduate degrees in Philosophy, English Literature, and Theology with a Harvard Ph.D. in Comparative Religion and a specialty in Buddhism. He has lived and taught in Boston, Bangkok and Chicago. For over ten years in New York City, he was a professor of religious studies at Fordham University´s Bronx and Lincoln Center Campuses. He was also visiting professor of Buddhism at Columbia University in New York City and Franklin University in Lugano, Switzerland. Now engaged in graduate school mentoring, he is also a fiction writer. He has published five novels: Fire in a Windless Place, Chartreuse, Portrait of a Woman, The Devil´s Interval, and The Odor of Sanctity. Two novellas, The Powers That Be and and Beyond the Pale appeared in print as Double Entendre. There followed three books of short stories: Outwards Signs, The Mansions of Limbo, and Triple Sec; then a play, Waging Waugh, and a memoir, As It Were. He has guided students in journalism and international studies at The New School for Social Research, and has contributed essays to the New School's newspaper in his online column, A Word to the Wise.