Friday's Dance

Not only a book of poems, Friday's Dance is also a joyful, patterned movement set to music, a particularly American tradition, that happened (and still does) many Friday evenings. Mike Schneider not only writes, but also partakes in (less often and vigorously than he once did) do-si-do, promenade home, and swing your partner. For longer than anyone knows, moreover, Friday has been Freia's Day-Freia being a northern goddess known in more southern places as Venus, Aphrodite and Ava Gardner. On her day (and not only then), Freia enchants us with that "great fuzzy verb" love - as Schneider denotes in his homage to the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda ("Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines"). As the title poem observes, "Sorrow murmurs in the back/ room of anybody's heart & no one knows/ who's in tune or out." Always there's a voice calling in our mind, whether or not we listen, to say, "Time with your neighbor will be brief." Music lives there too. In each of these poems, Schneider's sonic facility creates delicate melody with the sound and rhythm of words. He also invites us into the classical tradition ("Beethoven Quartet") and one of its greatest interpreters ("Furtwängler"). He takes us to an iced-over pond in moonlight ("Ice Dancing with Dolores") and shares a three-year old's delight with his pet Labrador's tongue ("Jolly Jumper"). Love's bewilderment rings throughout - from Marie Leveau dancing in Congo Square ("Devil's Dream") to a father seeing his daughter transform to Renoir's "Girl with a Watering Can" ("Connecting Flight"). Strap in for the ride.