In Their Final Performance by Brian Cordell

Brian Cordell has a rock and roll heart. This means, among other things, that his pantheon makes room for the likes of David Bowie as well as John Berryman, Townes Van Zandt as well as Larry Levis, and Jason Molina–who is the inspiration for a marvelous and bittersweet sequence of poems—as well as James Wright. He remembers, during a time when many of us forget such things, that the lyric poem originally arose as a form of song. And Cordell sings with passion, with elegiac ruefulness, and with an easy certainty of craft. IN THEIR FINAL PERFORMANCE is a quietly haunting collection.

–David Wojahn

This book is Brian Cordell’s tribute album to the musicians he loves among others, Jason Molina, Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain whose music he hears playing “underneath all this existence.” The poems in In Their Final Performance capture the way music can empty, decimate and heal all at the same time.   Throughout these poems, but especially in the sequence, “Fading Trails,” Cordell makes a brilliant music of his own using a range of forms with great dexterity, vivid details, strong feeling.  This book becomes his playlist for a road trip with those “blues burned souls” who both inspire and haunt him, a trip that takes us through edgy, compelling landscapes. “Oh, grace where have you gone?” the poet at one point asks, and the answer is:  Here.  Grace is right here, in these poems.

–Betsy Sholl

“It’s a long way between horizons,” Cordell writes, and indeed, this volume reads like a Rock ’n’ Roll steeped road trip wherein resonant human landscapes are glimpsed from a moving car. There is something ragged and groping about many of these poems that feels exactly right. Even the repetitive traditional forms he skillfully turns to here offer no neat, satisfying sense of closure. These are intelligent, carefully made, ambitious efforts from a serious poet. I’m delighted to see them in print.

–Mark Cox