Music is a River of Life

Can you imagine a world without music? We shape sounds into words, yet sound itself gives us the means to escape the bondage of words. We try to convey the essence of beauty in its most intense and ineffable forms, even when we know that the most well chosen words cannot quite express the scope of our experience. In this collection, allowing for the inadequacies of language, I have been inspired by the music of twelve composers, from the Middle Ages to our own time. This is not to say that all the poems are about music, but that these composers, each of whom has made their mark on our culture, have inspired my attempts to express beauty, both in terms of nature and human creativity in many forms, while coming back in the end to their music as my primary source of inspiration.