Los Alamos
Chemistry
Solstice
Morning Prayer
Inventory
Love Letter
Count my Bones
Watermill
Fires in the Desert

When pianist Paul Schenly first approached me, in December 1992, to commission a song cycle in honour of his friend, Barbara Goldowsky, he gave me a book of her poetry from which to select texts. The choice was not easy! Barbara's style is exceedingly musical, and her poems are rich with powerful images and emotions. In the end, I selected nine poems which encompassed two primary sources of inspiration: contemporary relationships and Native American themes. Though these two ideas may seem quite disparate, the poems are linked by a continuous and evolving thread of images. In an alternating pattern around a central song of loss, both ideas develop from an initial burst of primal earth-energy, through a life of hope mixed with fear, of faith challenged and affirmed, and finally ending with a sense of release, redemption and rebirth.

The poems are taken from Ferry to Nirvana and New Poems by Barbara Goldowsky.