Lois Roma-Deeley

MidWest Book Review:
"High Notes" is a fascinating read, and is not to be ignored.

Description

Against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement, an interracial love story unfolds. With its many thematic riffs and harmonic phrasings, Lois Roma-Deeley’s newest collection of poems invites the reader into the shadowy jazz scene of the late 1950s, where music and language fuse into a road of longing and desire.

Each of the main characters—hustler,jazz man, singer, waitress—and even the one hovering Angel who speaks to each of them—struggle with the tyranny of choice.

Jake’s addiction to drugs has resulted in the deaths of his children and the near ruin of his music. He “doesn’t know how to live” and doesn’t know if he wants to learn. (“The voices from outside of time/​will press their lips to both my cheeks and weep, What do you want?). Harry Jones (“The Minister of Rush Street”) tempts Jake, once again, with drugs, telling him to “Be that refusal/​ which does not bow and will not weep.”Sugar Baby’s unrelenting grief and emotional dependence on Jake has pivoted her life toward drugs, alcohol and prostitution.(“You go as morning and return at night/​ You go as shadow and return as light.”)

As the Civil Rights movement is stirring, Jasmine, for whom sexuality has always meant power, is beginning to confront her own anger over injustice. The spirits of Billie Holiday, Art Pepper, Chet Baker, Charlie “Bird” Parker, the crowd at the famed Minton’s jazz club, ghosts from Congo Square—even a blue monk and several archangels—wander in and out of the narrative offering advice and commenting on the action.

At each and every turn, the Angel has not given up these souls of “the imperfect now.” The Angel tells them: “Soon it will be enough/​under this blue note of still sky/​to open, slowly, both eyes and/​/​say it, sing it, play it/​/​blind.”

Advance praise for Lois Roma-Deeley’s High Notes

“The poetry is terse and direct, packed with significance. She creates language to capture a beautiful experience, the music of the lines alternate between dark and bright, sad and happy, mean and sweet. This is pain poetry, pain endured, celebrated, loved and danced to. This poetry tastes blood but not the blood of hospitals or healing, but of open wounds getting wider, deeper, unforgiving. It's taut, tough, in your face and orchestrates like a mad symphony of howls and laughters and blues, blues, blues baby, that burn to read. It's a clean, crisp, starlight fire, that'll lead you back to your life purpose and make you rethink and reshape your view of life.”
--Jimmy Santiago Baca

“In the emotionally rich and technically varied rhythms of High Notes, the voices of four men and women, black and white, negotiate between the excitements of jazz and the constrictions of poverty and drugs, accompanied and overseen by an angel’s presence. Jazz “greats” make cameo appearances in this lyrical, fragmented narrative, but the spotlight is on the invented characters. From sonnets and other fixed forms to jazz-inspired improvisations and prose poems, the book’s shifting styles reflect the characters’ complex lives. Incomplete, unresolved, hovering between tragedy and redemption, their story stays with us.”
--Martha Collins

“Containing riffs and improvisations in various keys and tempos, Lois Roma-Deeley's High Notes captures the starkness and despair of the late 50s jazz scene, where every blues number is fueled by alcohol, heroin, and guilt. High Notes unrolls like a period film in blacks, whites, and all the shades of gray, telling the intertwined stories of four characters who can endure anything except the absence of hope.”
--R.S.Gwynn