Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong

When Thomas Hardy listens to Louis Armstrong, music reaches out to poetry across centuries and oceans. Here, a "dreamer at a loss" passes notes to a classmate, "cards of absolute equivocation" that "run through all the scales in all the keys," from "a man of many hats" to Osip Mandelstam's tambourine, from the dream of a monk to a broken traffic light.