Bombshell rainy morning. Finally had the presence of mind to go through P.J. Laska’s missive rec’d last week. O my word. Edited mss of A Milky Way Accent, by the late Bob Snyder, published by the author two years before his death.
I brewed a cup of tea and read Old Martins New Strings by Mason Dixon Trio (Joseph Barrett, P.J. Laska, Bob Snyder, 1990, Soup Bean Press) from cover to cover. Experimental in presentation, substantive as presence.
I have a few copies, PM me if you’re interested. Or email Igneuspress@gmail.com.
Other Igneus titles by P.J. Laska can be ordered here, here, here, and here. Please support small independent poetry press. All of our proceeds go back into Igneus.
In OLD MARTINS, NEW STRINGS The Mason-Dixon Trio breaks with the unvarying solo form in which poetry is published. The result is a polyphonic composition in which three West Virginia poets bring their work together around a set of common themes: love, family, region, earth. Evident throughout is the “new tuning” of the Northern West Virginia (“Norbilly”) school – a baroque maximalist style that combines class and vulgarity, the comic and the sublime.
OLD MARTINS, NEW STRINGS is “more than memory,” “terra ridentium,” “the Secret Word a-leaping, an intriguing three way mirror of contemporary American reality.”