Songs of Unsung People

The inhabitants of Frank Jamison's Songs of Unsung People are the people we meet every day on the streets and in the diners, some physically strong and some who get about with the help of walkers. From a preacher on a street corner to a woman on a ferry bound for Sausalito, some engaged in the everyday minutiae of life as store clerks and waitresses or, more outlandishly, a man showing off cats for a crowd gathered to watch a Key West sunset-all are caught by the poet at a telling moment in life, rendered in deft detail to become the people you and I know and have known.

These poems celebrate the unsung and uncelebrated people among us. With a photographer's eye, but the poet's camera, Frank Jamison trains his lens of compassion and respect, moment to moment, on people we might easily miss. With beautifully attentive language, he parts the shadows and sheds light on the woman riding the ferry who "lifts her collar against the chill," or the tatooed man who comes "alive with art," or the girl in the blue Tercel who may be dreaming "about her child or the kiss she gave her husband after breakfast," or the couple who "went in and fell madly in love," or the man "tapping his cane against the pavement, sending messages no one answers." Jamison's characters range from his home ground in Appalachia to a woman selling blankets in Peru to a woman watering her squash plants in Nanking, China. Each hero will "leap up on spread wings" from this collection as we relish their point of witnessed radiance.