Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems

Indefatigably edited by scholar Scheyer, this eye-opening volume reintroduces Black American poet Spellman, author of 1965’s The Beautiful Days and 2008’s Things I Must Have Known; in between, he turned to arts advocacy for underserved communities, working with the National Endowments of the Arts. Selections from both books appear along with a fistful of uncollected poems: ambitious new work written since 2008 makes up nearly half the book. Throughout, Spellman meditates on being in the world (“you there spinning/ in the vortex between thinking & / feeling & living”), Black heritage and racism; and the arts; a formidable jazz critic, he revisits music (on John Coltrane, “may he have new life like the fall/ fallen tree, wet moist rotten enough / to see shoots”) as well as writing and painting (a magisterial series on Van Gogh includes the wondrous line “that the beginning is the resolution every time”). Though sometimes syntactically fractured, these poems are never overloaded; word choice is so precise that readers live in the poet’s mind as he writes. It’s not scene but thought painting (“she thinks of thought / as windows, as ice around the dance”).