A journey through heaven and earth for the questing mind. Navigating from the clockwork music of the spheres to the "melismatic celebration of disaster" that is the blues, these are poems that map the places where orderly cosmic harmony and dissonance converge.

"If only the world were as orderly as Bach, if there were no need for gospel, no need for jazz, no need for the blues." As Anthony Walton writes, centuries ago, Johannes Kepler observed that the universe was a form of music.
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It made me understand that there was more to music thanresolution, that there were other sorts of beauty. That beautycould be pain, and balm could be fit to the jagged shadowsof my experience.
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Whether his subject is Sir Isaac Newton or street traffic, Walton is always surprising, with humanity and passion in every line. Celestial Mechanics is more than a book of poetry; it is an "Ars Poetica" for the heart.