Of Song and Water
By Joseph Coulson
(Archipelago Books, Paperback, 9780981987385, 272pp.)
Publication Date: May 2010
Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover
Categories: Literary
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"Joseph Coulson's writing makes a reader hear jazz."—Los Angeles Times
Forced to abandon his musical career, Coleman Moore finds himself at midlife in the company of ghosts: his grandfather, a rumrunner and Great Lakes pirate; his jazz mentor, a black man in a white town; and his first love. Like a melody or a swift stream, Of Song and Water pulls us into a world of hidden truth, crushed dreams, and possible redemption.
Joseph Coulson, novelist, poet, and playwright, was born in Detroit in 1957. His first novel, The Vanishing Moon (2004) was selected for the Barnes & Noble Great New Writers series and won the Book of the Year Award, Gold Medal in Literary Fiction, from ForeWord Magazine . Coulson is the author of three volumes of poetry: The Letting Go, A Measured Silence, and Graph. His first play, A Saloon at the Edge of the World (co-authored with William Relling, Jr.), a noir drama showcased by Theater Artists of Marin, won both popular and critical acclaim in the San Francisco Bay area. Coulson has been the recipient of a Gray Writing Fellowship (selected by Robert Creeley) and a Ph.D. in American literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. A teacher for many years, he recently served as Editorial Director for the Great Books Foundation in Chicago. He now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
"Like the best of the smoky, slow-burn [jazz], Of Song and Water unfold with deceptively simple writing, the meaning and feeling building up almost unnoticed... ... the overall effect is like Coleman's music––understated, steady bass undercurrent, drum flourishes, and guitar work that, if you're only partway listening, seems competent enough, but when you give yourself up to the story, let it settle around you, can change the colors in the room."
—The Quarterly Conversation
"Of Song and Water , a more tightly focused novel than Coulson's first, derives its unique style from jazz and does a fine job examining the ways that social tensions exert pressure on individual lives not in terms of historic events, but as manifested in personal conflicts." —Donna Seaman
The jazz scenes crackle with energy and authority, ... Coulson moves fluidly between the past and the present, and the novel is ultimately quiet, affecting and redemptive. —Publishers Weekly
"Joseph Coulson’s writing makes a reader hear jazz. There’s a bounce in Moore’s utter failures; he's held aloft by something we all want a piece of: maybe it’s music, maybe it’s something else." —L.A. Times
"Patterns of dark and light shift and morph like shadows on water....Love abandoned, violence sustained, guilt, grief, the transcendence of sailing and making music, all play in jazzlike counterpoint."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist
"The power of this beautiful novel stems as much from the rich and poignant music that emanates from it, from its permanent ebb and flow between past and present, as from the tide of memories that recount the painful drift of one man."
— Le Monde
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