In 1290, the Jews were banished from England. In 1655-1656, Jews once more became a part of British society, returning to the London of Oliver Cromwell, Pepys and Henry Purcell. To commemorate the 350th anniversary of this return, Michelene Wandor has written a sensuous dramatic narrative poem evoking seventeenth-century London, and telling the story of the two men who made this return possible: Oliver Cromwell and Menasseh ben Israel. "Music of the Prophets" is the third in a sequence of long poems celebrating the presence of the Jews in England. The text seduces and challenges with a delicacy and flow, combining open-form experiment with a musical delight in counterpoint, irony and wit.

A selection from a wide-ranging body of work, this book gathers together poems which explode the biblical myth of womanhood, poems of domestic tragi-comedy admired by Gavin Ewart and poems about music.

VI give me time I said and note my grace in loving you let me divide and ornament you touch you above and below circle around your key note enter your fifth dimension and perfect your cadence let me feel your greater and lesser thirds modulate your modes and minor your majors VII I want to trill your renaissance way beginning sure and supreme on your given, written note and flirt my way across distance to the note above taking you into history with me in dissonance Michelene Wandor's new poetry collection excels in the richness of its subject matter, the witty and sensuous language, the musicality of its rhythms and the way in which she is able to combine sophistication with accessibility. She is as comfortable with Italian Renaissance music as she is with the poignancy of the history of Europe's Jewish populations. Her retelling of the "Book of Esther" is a tour de force of Midrashic free-form poetry, and her speculation on Shakespeare's "Dark Lady of the Sonnets" is a tribute to both Elizabethan poetry and a mischievous imagination.