Not a Violin

It is the rare writer who can enter the mysterious world of music making and then conjure words that come very close to describing an experience that is arguably near impossible to describe. Martin Agee, a prominent New York City violinist, does just this in his debut poetry collection, Not a Violin. From the horizon of a childhood Kansas prairie to the intimate space between his chin and violin, to Carnegie Hall and a Broadway show pit amidst Mahler and Sondheim, Agee plumbs the human condition with wisdom and empathy. His poems are lyrical and assured and funny and heartbreaking, all at once, making this marvelous collection a joy to read.

-Marcia Butler, author, Dear Virginia, Wait for Me

Violinist/poet Martin Agee's poetry swirls in graceful, settling patterns, like foamy ocean waves filling hollows in sand. Soon you realize that someone like Agee not writing during decades of playing violin - must have caused some pain - similar to the pain of someone who adores the sound and smell of the sea living for decades far inland. These high-charged poems by Agee...have a former exile's exasperated outcry.

-Rebecca Pyle, artist, critic, writer; winner, The Los Angeles Review Creative Nonfiction Award

There is candor and wisdom in these poems, an inexhaustible tenderness tempered by scrupulous - even reverent - attention to the hard truths of life: to what lies beyond comprehension, and beyond redress. The language is plainspoken, the vision wide and unguarded. In the final poem, Coltrane is invoked. The name conjures that beautiful threnody, A Love Supreme. Only a mature artist endowed with the bravery of innocence can speak in this voice. And let me not forget how funny these poems can be - wry, at times flat-out hilarious, and often disarmingly playful in the midst of contemplative depth. Such virtues, the subtle music in which they are embedded, the emotional range of the work - all these depend, of course, on the reader's generous participation.

-Joel Agee, author, The Stone World and Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany