Still sourcing and exploring two massive, braided streams of retrospective invention—‘Mu’ and Song of the Andoumboulou—Mackey’s liturgy falls and sprays and pools in Double Trio. Bottomless, modal, modular as McCoy Tyner’s matched, augmented threes, surfaces bloomed with turbulent, recombinant bottom like Bill Dixon’s double-bassed ensembles, Double Trio doesn’t culminate: it promises.

That condition of music that Walter Pater said we all aspire to has been reached by Nathaniel Mackey in his wild merging of sound and sense (both in making it and in rejecting its packaged forms).

Double Trio moves in the recursive, spiraling way of an improviser juggling a theme. Insofar-I and his travelers move across a quickly shifting landscape of cities and countries, with death keeping time. All three books move in the time of Mackey’s scansion, hitting the hi-hat of that hanging syllable.

Over the years, Mackey’s two works have intertwined into what he calls ’the long song,’ recounting the travels of a band of refugees, a ‘philosophic posse’ exiled somewhere outside of history as we understand it. The destination or substance of their wanderings—the surreal moments when they cross paths with a description of Eric Dolphy’s clarinet, an imaginary tune about Eric Garner, the view from a slaver’s ship, or a nineteen-eighties military campaign—matters less than the sensations and mystical visions they gather along the way. They are constantly starting over, discovering worlds within their worlds. Their journeys don’t tell a story so much as they map a kind of alternative history of humankind…. Mackey’s poetry is like an archive of all that the world forgot, what might have been had humans resisted the desire to enslave and colonize one another.

These poems are epic meditations that transform and transcend the everyday into an otherworldly, timeless space.

For decades, National Book Award-winner Mackey has devoted himself to creating a long poem that covers ambitious territory — and he begins this installment by recalling how early free jazz musicians re-invented the multi-disc record collection because they needed several albums to record their fertile improvisations; you might say that Double Trio is Mackey’s multi-disc box set. Double Trio is a libretto of metaphysical music and probably the most important poetry collection to come out this year.

Mackey’s own rare combinations create an astonishing and resounding effect: his words go where music goes: a brilliant and major accomplishment.

Because of their crablike logic Mackey’s lines feel simultaneously abraded and buffed, their meanings fugitive, tremulous, mercurial. He is a lyric poet whose probing of wounds and the whir of words reaches into epic dimensions.

Mackey is doing what might be the most technically virtuosic rhythmo- syntactic work in the English language. No one comes close. I hope these two long poems never end.

Nathaniel Mackey is a poet of ongoingness involved in a kind of spiritualist or cosmic pursuit.

Mackey’s major prose project is an experiment in serial fiction called From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. It feels, sentence to sentence and page to page, like a work in the act of being created. It is not simply writing about jazz, but writing as jazz… There is a cliché about music writing, sometimes attributed to Thelonious Monk, among others: ‘ Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ If so, Nathaniel Mackey is compelled, rather than deterred, by the multiform madness of the enterprise. he is the Balanchine of the architecture dance.