Graph

Of Song and Water is a tale of singlehanded sailors and jazz musicians, of working-class dreams blighted by family duty, personal betrayals, and the untold violence between fathers and sons.

“Poems are a graph of the mind….”

 Allen Ginsberg, in conversation

Reviews  |  Purchase

“Motifs of silence and inarticulateness, broken music, which are paradoxically made articulate and musical by the fact of the poetry, are carried forward brilliantly. Sound becomes a metaphor for feeling….”

John Logan

“Joseph Coulson brings to his verse the disciplines of the composer of serious, contemporary music. His rhythms are inventive, his prosody modulates beautifully with the tenor of the writing, his poems move vigorously to their conclusions in consistently sustained measures, and, at a time when many writers are abandoning improvisational verse, Coulson has achieved a sound which allows him to speak to us forcefully in the accents of our own, richly complex idioms.”

Stephen Tudor

Out of Print Poetry Books

  • A Measured Silence (1986)
  • The Letting Go (1984)