Snake-Back Solos: Selected Poems, 1969-1977

by Quincy Troupe

Selected poems written 1969 - 1977 by African-American poet Quincy Troupe.

Genres: Poetry

79 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. is an American poet, editor, journalist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California. He is best known as the biographer of Miles Davis, the jazz musician.

Reviews

[David Garza · Rating 3 out of 5]

The cityscapes work best for me. I think because Troupe is able to get concrete about things. And maybe also because the poems seem more personal to Troupe.

His poems steeped in music (Miles and Coltrane make multiple appearances) are more impressionistic, abstract meanderings downstream. Here I think Troupe is attempting to be universal, and, in doing so, he loses some of the personal touches that could make a poem physically immediate in its phrasing. When jazz and blues are his muses, my impression is that the poems are pretty much what his readers would expect from jazz and blues poems.

This collection ends with a piece called " My Poems Have Holes Sewn Into Them". I like his use of a self-referential poem as a conclusion. It's one of his highlights.