The Voices

One of the main themes is the essential presence of music and music-making in the world; "I would never go into the dark without the voices," as the title poem says. The book also includes a number of elegies for departed family members and friends in balance with poems that celebrate existence--"love your life," as the final (wedding) poem insists. The epigraph at the beginning of the book suggests the way we all must live in contradiction.