Marsh River Editions

in search of

“Green Dolphin

Street”

by Robert Schuler

Robert Schuler's new collection shows us how the present moment is shot through with past and future moments, how a great musician like Bill Evans breaks transience open and invites us in. The poet's lines call out for recitation: "so much room / for the music to roam / piano chords climbing / stretching / crystal / bridges / through the nothingness of air / time slowed down / tightened to dreams" (from "Bill Evans playing 'Nardis' by Miles Davis"). His credo, "poetry," says it all: "paint the instants / give them weight / a heft in the hand / gold in the eye / belly all the way up to them." We have here a true inheritor of William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder. Read Robert Schuler and weep and laugh and sing with him.

Robert W. Greene

Just as the music that inspires them, the poems in in search of "Green Dolphin Street" are celebrations of the moment, whether ecstatic or meditative. Robert Schuler well knows that all we really have is moments—and what we make of them. In this vibrant collection, he has indeed made a great deal.

Mark Vinz

Robert Schuler is a poet passionately searching to connect his senses with his sentences, to find words for the enchanted moments of jazz and blues, landscape and painting, love and ordinary experience, even the "cant and wobble of cobblestones." These are strong poems, hungry for words, phrases, lines, rhythms, and figures that will "paint the instants / give them weight."

George T. Wright

ISBN 978-0-9718909-4-7

Published 2004

35 pages

French flap outer wraps

Edition limited to 350 copies.

$10

Bill Evans playing “Nardis” by Miles Davis

by Robert Schuler

how irrepressibly impossibly

beautiful so much like

the way

he plays Carisi's "Israel"

slow so few notes

impeccably spaced to evoke

reverence love

for the moment life

all

for Nardis

the notes silken

she leans over the iron balcony

the bass pulsing giving her blood

soul and flesh

long past midnight

so much room

for the music to roam

piano chords climbing

stretching

crystal

bridges

through the nothingness of air

time slowed down

tightened to dreams

TO ORDER:

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Send check, made out to Marsh River Editions, to:

Marsh River Editions

Linda Aschbrenner

M233 Marsh Road

Marshfield, WI 54449

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