In Conjugations and Reiterations Albert Murray, one of the premier literary men of our time, gives us his first collection of poetry. Wide ranging and informed by his singular intelligence and sensibility, these poems are extraordinary for their keen folk wisdom and striking lyricism, partaking of the idioms of blues and jazz. The vicissitudes of American life, the improvisatory nature of American art, the profundities of the Gospel and of gospel music—these are but a few of the concerns in Murray’s poetic achievement.

Conjugations and Reiterations stands in ringing confirmation of The New Yorker’s celebration of Albert Murray as a writer “possessed of the poet’s language, the novelist’s sensibility, the essayist’s clarity, the jazzman’s imagination, and the gospel singer’s depth of feeling.”