Today

Here's a new music of greatest subtlety where the poems' musicality is not due only to their sounds but to their structure. The use of repetitions with minute variations goes beyond its equivalence in contemporary American music, and achieves the hypnotic power that we find only in the best renditions of, for example, classical Persian melodies. Stephen Ratcliffe has taken his poetic researches into highest territory by instinctively managing to assemble his modules - or short verses, in ways strategically controlled and still seamlessly and hauntingly beautiful.