Review of Ornate with Smoke [1997]

In the prefce to Ornate with Smoke (1997), his latest volume of jazz poetry, Sterling Plumpp describes the book as “my way of saying thanks to the music which brings literacy to the spirit” (p. x). Plumpp proceeds to place a wondrous literacy on display from the opening line, which is the single but loaded signifier — Coltrane — to the closing stanza twenty-seven poems later: Spirituals and toasts and field hollers and blues and sermons and swing and Dixie land and be bop are the stops on the road I travel where I know I will never know the entire geography of my horn But I will come out each night and I will solo and travel where ever my horn leads me on let me stand (pp. 102–03)