Coming Late to Rachmaninoff - Hardcover

Terrill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1879852918 ISBN 13: 9781879852914

Publisher: University of Tampa Press, 2003

Synopsis

Writing with a multilayered perspective from the Mid-west and middle class at middle age, Richard Terrill portrays the landscape and people of northern Wisconsin, where he was raised, and southern Minnesota, where he has lived and worked more recently for a dozen years. Here, too, are references to far-off China and Korea, where the poet has also resided, and to his experiences at home with his Chinese wife and family. But music is at the center of Coming Late to Rachmaninoff, and Terrillıs first collection of poems proves he has an eye for the ironic and the beautiful, an ear for music and the music of our language, and a curiosity about the ways daily experience confounds our most well- meaning gestures and surprises our expectations.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Terrill is the author of three books of creative nonfiction, including Fakebook: Improvisations on a Journey Back to Jazz and Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for nonfiction. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin and Minnesota State Art Boards, the Jerome Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writerıs Conference. His essays, poems, and translations from the Chinese have appeared widely in journals suck as North American Review, Iowa Review, Tampa Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He has taught at universities in China and Korea and now teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He lives in Minneapolis and plays saxophone with local jazz groups.

From the Back Cover

"Richard Terrillıs title poem "Coming Late to Rachmaninoff," speaks of the composer who "wept a little daily, a black well." The poem says "nothing is changed by your music/except that I am changed." So it is with these poems, edgy as the player missing a page of his solo, tender as a man opening his life to his wifeıs sons. Music, family, grief, the possibility of love theyıre all here. Ornette Coleman, B.B. King, Miles David, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker. And one poet blowing hard bop licks on a tenor sax, offering these fine poems." ­ Peggy Shumaker

"I suppose Richard Terrill might say that he is "coming late" to poetry, but how fortunate for us that heıs arrived now, with his book full of revelations. What is it that I like best about these poems? I like that they donıt put on any airs, that they mention styrofoam cups and traffic in the same breath as Rachmaninoffıs violins, that they span the globe but always keep coming back to the hometown. I love the combination of tenderness and wryness on every page and how I kept imagining a voice reading the poems to an audience that sighed and laughed together." ­Joyce Sutphen

"The music of this musician/poet is romantic in a slightly minor key: Rachmaninoffıs Second rediscovered on a car radio in a strip mall, the string behind Sinatra playing "sheer at the moonlight we donıt have to imagine streaming in our small-town old house on a very, very cold night." Terrill writes movingly and masterfully about the season, especially autumnıs drift into winter; about domesticity, alienation, mortality, sorrow, mirth, and love often as they relate to music or musicians. The insights come from someone grown wise enough not to fret about the playing of the wrong notes, whoıs come to understand that Miles Davis meant when he said, "There arenıt any." ­ William Trowbridge

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Tampa Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English, Middle (1100-1500)
• ISBN 10: 1879852918
• ISBN 13: 9781879852914
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 94