Douwe Eisenga: Poetry of a City

Poetry of a City begins with the gentle, rolling arpeggios of "Have I Not Tried." Douwe Eisenga's triplets stretch the tension in the chord out across the beat. The melody is played in double stops to add weight to the rhythm's swing. A violin enters, far below the piano, drawing out long, mournful notes. The chord progression loops back on itself, ushering in the jagged syncopation of the strings and the hard slamming of the percussion. This is one of Eisenga's signature moves: repeated arpeggios that cycle around, bringing changes each time they begin again.

Eisenga's older albums featured just himself and the piano, and these changes were very subtle variations in melody, harmony, and rhythm. On his last release, The Border (Butler, 2022), strings, synthesizers, and woodwind and brass sections were added to that distinctive approach to the piano and made The Border a record of great power. Poetry of a City—a collection of music inspired by poems painted on the walls of Eisenga's home city—is a softer collection. The marimba on "Suddenly He Sang" fills the role usually played by the piano—carrying the harmony and the rhythm and leaving Eisenga free to dance gracefully through the melody. The volume builds gradually here, unlike on "Have I Not Tried" and "Evening," where the drums suddenly rocket the volume up, then fade almost as quickly. "Zilsverspa For Piano," which began as a song by Eisenga's friend Broeder Dieleman, is a solo piano piece, and maintains a quiet, melancholic mood, never building to a crescendo.

Poetry of a City continues Eisenga's experiments with instruments' timbres that began on The Border. However, where the latter was a loud, brassy, syncopated experience, the former weaves the timbres together like threads of different materials, and keeps the emphasis firmly on the downbeat. That is its one flaw. Emphasizing the first beat of each bar allows for very little rhythmic variation, and the album's weaker moments suffer from a kind of stagnation. They do not have the swing of Eisenga's finest works, and Poetry of a City's tracks "Posters" and "Suddenly He Sang" can be counted as among his best. But that insistent pushing on the "one" rings through all of the record, to the detriment of the whole.

Melancholia moves through Poetry of a City like wind through a forest, as it has done on each of Eisenga's records since For Mattia (TRPTK, 2019). Here, though, it is not handled with the same deftness and ingenuity as on previous recordings: this is just that much more repetitive than The Border or For Mattia, which dulls its edges somewhat. Aspects of it are as wondrous as Eisenga's work has been in the past, but others sound tired, worn-out. This is a very good record; Eisenga's past ones have been brilliant.