SOME GRAND DUST

William Minor had been married (to the same woman!) for thirty-eight years when he started his collection of short pieces entitled Our Peasant Life. Minor spares neither wit nor compassion when he explores marriage, love, household, family, and neighbors in this charming work.

In Moker, Minor turns his life around, imagining that he hadn't pursued the woman he would love the rest of his life, or the passion for music that has kept him focussed. His alter ego, Moker, pads about an empty apartment in bare feet, divorced (he didn't find the right woman!), imagines a daughter he never had, and finds peace through acceptance and humor.

Minor's skillfully crafted poems weave a story of life, longing, and loving in the years beyond youth. Some Grand Dust is an extraordinary portrait of ordinary lives.

William Minor was originally trained as a visual artist at Pratt Institute and U.C. Berkeley. Attracted by the "multimedia" work of William Blake, e.e. cummings, Kenneth Patchen and Shiko Munakata (and the voice of Dylan Thomas), he began to write poetry thirty-seven years ago (as a graduate student in Language Arts at San Francisco State), producing his first book containing poems and prints, Pacific Grove, in 1974. Bill has, since that time, published four more books of poetry. A jazz writer with over 150 articles to his credit, Bill has also published two books on music: Unzipped Souls: A Jazz Journey Through the Soviet Union (Temple University Press) and Monterey Jazz Festival: Forty Legendary Years (Angel City Press). A third nonfiction work, The Heart Within: Jazz Journeys to Japan, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. He has set poems from his book For Women Missing or Dead to music and recorded a CD—Bill Minor & Friends—on which he plays piano, tenor guitar, and sings.