Shortlisted for the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award

The poems in Calm Jazz Sea reveal a world forever becoming and disappearing, watched over and handled gently by the compassionate intelligence of Mike Barnes. In the everyday and the ephemeral meals, drinks, weather, work, moments of solitude or connection he finds ways to engage the secret matter of humanity: what horrifies, astonishes, or comforts us. Like the sea of the title, restless and receptive, the language of the poems moves through many levels of voice: from an easy vernacular to the strain of conversation, or from the precise record of sensual matter to the insubstantial gestures that constitute thought.