Great book! This book, Blues for Bird, is worth all the other biographies of Charlie Parker combined. A concise and direct evocation of the jazzman's life, it tells the tragic story of his rise and fall, and the tragic decline of his later years--it censors nothing, it tells the story better than a more detailed biographical volume, And does it with a poet's ear and eye! Alright! Be-bop!

Somebody ought to make a bunch of CDs, with an actor reading these highly accessible poems against a backdrop of Charlie Parker's music. They'd be a wow!

How can you write an epic today when the world is no longer 'story-shaped'? You can go back and translate 'Beowulf', as Seamus Heaney has done, or you can be like Martin Gray and write an epic life in quantum bursts of three-stress energy.