Irish Musicians/American Friends

"The poems are anecdotal memoirs about the older men, the Irish musicians, who inducted Winch, the son of Irish immigrants, into their profession. Each poem's vignette or character sketch is connected to the others by the Irish-American milieu the characters shared, but more intimately by the flatness of the voice describing the people and the happenings. The voice features a vocabulary and syntax so controlled it creates the illusion of a perfect surface tension, perhaps the perfect expression of the times and atmosphere Winch describes in these poems. It's the kind of contemporary classic you want to share with the world." --Michael Lally