David Meltzer

Softcover, 188 pages ISBN: 1-57423-129-4 2000 $16.95   No Eyes: Lester Young a poem sequence by David Meltzer   In 1959, at the age of fifty, tenor man Lester Young—a lyrical player, his airy tone haunted by a breathy melancholy—died alone in the Arvin Hotel in Manhattan. David Meltzer’s latest book is a poetic meditation on the last year of Young’s life, a year of joyful playing and self-willed dying, of creation and negation. But what do “eyes” and “no eyes” mean? In hipster’s parlance: “To see or not to see, to be or not to be, to do or to die.” 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.”   Hardcover, 196 pages ISBN: 0-87685-939-2 1994 $26.95 Softcover, 196 pages ISBN: 0-87685-938-4 $14.95     Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992 by David Meltzer