Double Quartet, Volume II continues Nathaniel Mackey’s two intertwined serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and “Mu,” which he has been composing since the 1970s. Drawing on diverse traditions of poetry, literature, and jazz, Mackey pursues a musical approach to verging on and dispensing with the epic form. The poems follows a band of nervous, weary, and bewildered travelers as they touch on the predicaments and apprehensions of exile and uprootedness. Mackey’s writing moves by way of angle, ellipse, and accretion. He employs the arts, lore, figurative traditions, and historical motifs of the African diaspora and beyond to further a cross-cultural weave of global reach. Together, the poems of Double Quartet enact an improvisational jazz aesthetic that valorizes the tangled relationships of part to whole and whole to part. Double Quartet once again demonstrates Mackey’s innovative and distinctive mastery of rendering the ineluctable entwinement of the poetic and the musical, the written and the spoken.

Nathaniel Mackey is Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University. His numerous works of poetry, fiction, and criticism include Splay Anthem, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, and Paracritical Hinge.