Beethoven in Denver and Other Poems

In the title poem, set during Raffel's time as a Professor of English at Denver University, Beethoven returns from the dead and moves in with Raffel for extended conversations on music, politics, women, history, chocolate, mountains, love and God. According to the narrator, the composer returns because "Beethoven would risk anything," but it is Raffel who has dared to imagine this magical, whimsical and inspired dialogue with the myth of Romanticism itself, forging anew the character of creative inspiration. Over the course of the poem, Beethoven emerges as both ordinary and supernatural, naive yet eternal, vulgar and divine. In the rest of the book Raffel presents 18 lyrics about love, death, and memory. It is a sequence that unleashes the inspired promise of the book's first part, a dark, intense vision illuminated by revelations of the ordinary.