Featured Audio: Rose Solari Reads "The Beginning , 1939"

In "The Beginning, 1939" Rose Solari's mastery of recitation is put to the music of her capricious mother and the frantic hopes of her father who wishes to leave "no long, tight pauses for her to fill." I've written before about Rose's use of swing and rhythmic motifs in her work, elements which are alive in this poem, but what is really mesmerizing to me about "1939" is the musical image toward the end which harbors no pretense of cramming lieder into language, but instead focuses on the very physical act of her mother playing the piano:

and while her left hand was dissolving / in a bass chord, into the shadow, her right hand— / a little closer to the camera— was caught / in the air between the last note and the next.