Sound Passages
Explorations of nostalgia, grief, and love in familiar and altered landscapes.
all those things / we think / we have / to carry.
These poems travel widely. Across three sequences – "Airborne," "Landlocked," and "Sound Passages" – Brian Wickers navigates the outer worlds of the natural and celestial while also probing the inner terrain of the personal and the everyday.
Inviting and at times light-hearted in style, Sound Passages explores the intersections between the overlooked and mundane and the weightier matters and preoccupations of contemporary life. Whether focused on the troubled urban and natural environments where “nothing’s quiet, not even silence,” confronting aging and loss, or exploring the uncertainties of modern dating and relationships, Wickers’s keen eye and open ear for language take the reader into land- and soundscapes at once familiar and altered.
Exuberant and sombre, serious and ironic, the poems in Sound Passages leave the reader possessed and dispossessed – aware of both loss and the compensations we can find in the world and in ourselves. Wickers sees the world as beyond us yet still approachable: “we can love just a little bit of it so much, and deeply enough / to be its keeper, to own and know it as a way of going home.”
“Resonant sonics tickle the mind. Lightning becomes ‘a ragged bolt’s / broken-open voltage.’ Airplane takeoff leads to ‘a vast room of wings.’ Wickers’s verse encompasses the magic of a playground at dusk, the mysteries of aging, and the ages of love. Tender, playful, imaginative, heartfelt – this book is a tonic for troubled times.” Jean Van Loon, author of Nuclear Family
“Sound Passages cozens music from the deeply observed world. The patience, soulful; the world dimming. The resultant music: giddy. Wickers is a master distiller.” John Emil Vincent, author of White Lily