Duende

Duende gathers selected poems from more than fifty years of work by Quincy Troupe, a poet and biographer who was also a friend of Miles Davis. It draws on his eleven earlier volumes and adds many new poems. The book is a very large offering from a generous and gregarious writer.

Troupe writes in great waves, and for him words are like notes: what counts is the music made from them. His long, repetitive, incantatory lines look across the sea toward Africa and are haunted by the legacy of slavery and racism. They also remember fellow poets and musicians and celebrate them, though never only in celebration. The fifty-page poem "Ghost Voices" holds a longing to be reconnected with the past alongside a longing to be free of it. The short title poem, "For García Lorca and Miles Davis," lays bare his belief in the mystery and black magic that enter bodies through music, art and poetry, giving language its sovereignty.

The version of "Avalanche (number 3)" printed here differs from the one he published nearly twenty-five years ago, much as a jazz musician plays the same song a little differently each time. Across the collection the constancy and energy stand out. Troupe speaks to the reader in the here and now while also seeing what others have not yet noticed, perhaps a storm gathering far out over the water that people will soon have to face.