No Eyes

A sequence of poems on the life of the great tenor saxophone jazz player Lester Young, interwoven with archival photographs.

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A poetic meditation on the last year of tenor saxophonist Lester Young’s life, of joyful playing and self-willed dying.

In 1959, at the age of fifty, jazz greaet Lester Young—a lyrical player, his airy tone haunted by a breathy melancholy—died alone in the Arvin Hotel in Manhattan. As Meltzer explains, “No Eyes is a book about death, and Young sits in for a metaphor for the artist living and dying for and with his art.”

An “inside” biography, No Eyes is a brilliant jazz-world evocation, composed in free verse whose flow is arrested to capture significant moments, Meltzer creates a layered narrative of vivid colors and textures, the material facts of Young’s story dissolving into internalized, projected truths of erotic understanding and spiritual sympathy with the “sweet and isolate lovely other.”