crescendo I decrescendo

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Bo Niles’ third collection of poetry, crescendo decrescendo, addresses the power and perils of memory and what it is like to slowly lose a vibrant loved one—here, her father—in the context of all he was before. In the first poem, Etude, the father is fourteen with shoulder blades “as tender as the drawn-back wings of a dove” as he plays the piano, “hoping for his father’s sincere regard.” After a lifetime devoted to music, an end-poem, Aria, becomes the benediction the boy wishes for, here bestowed by his daughter, who wants to “inhale/the coda of [his] life.” Poems are, after all, music, and this collection sings the father in full. Frances Richey, author, The Warrior