Wild Life by Tony Whedon

For decades Tony Whedon has been known to his discerning fans both as a stellar jazz musician and a superb poet.  I hear the sonnets in this late collection as deftly phrased, well-calibrated solos, just long enough to engage and enchant us, brief enough that they are over before we know it and leave us asking for more: fractal expressions of his whole, of this brooding and moving book of poems on living in a broken world—the poems often register and assess losses, of people, of history, of opportunity—but also poems generous in providing the assuagements of art and song.  One of them ends “everybody/tells me my chops are gone” but don’t believe a word of this: Whedon’s style has not lost the poignant timbre and “perfect articulation” he heard when Curtis Fuller was young and tall.  Not that the poetry is all music: the book also lays out a piquant feast of narrative: short stories and novellas compressed into fourteen short lines (give it a try if you want to know how hard this is to bring off).  But Whedon’s skill at compression comes with an equal power to expand at will and with ease—see his portrait of an addict in a museum looking at a Song dynasty scroll painting—though the expansive excursions typically draw in again, to refocus on a particular, often rendered in words at once simple and gorgeous: “a haunted Georgia evening, a pair/of songbirds hovering in the early dark.”  Readers will finish this book and want to put the needle at the beginning of the record, to hear what we missed the first time, as those soulful and graceful solos slid by.

–Robert Hahn