Description
Book SynopsisTen long poems that try to do for America what Shakespeare did for England: turn history and legend into poetry.American Cycle, a sequence of long poems inspired by our folklore and past, was written over forty-seven years. Its themes are love, local mythology, history, justice, memory, accomplishment, time. "The books are extraordinary, sustained explosions of authentic American language and energy. Each is entirely different from the others in style, voice, form and narrative content; each so rich in imagery and nuance and texture and event and so finely crafted. . . " —Paul Williams, author of
Bob Dylan: Performing Artist. Its styles are connected to our speech: Spanish words loaned from Old California, rough colloquialisms in Paul Bunyan, the power of African-American vernacular English in John Henry, bare oratory in Chief Joseph, old west phrases in Wyatt Earp, circus ballyhoo in P. T. Barnum, aviation jargon in Amelia Earhart, backwoods dialect in Blue Ridge. As Walt Whitman says, "I hear America singing, the varied carols. . .”
Trade Review"This magnum opus of poetry." —Kirkus Review
"Larry Beckett’s new big book of poetry, American Cycle, takes readers into the past and rewrites our national epic for the twenty-first century." —Jonah Raskin, author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation
"His song is not just of himself, but of all of us. 'Missing me one place, search another; / I stop somewhere, waiting for you.'" —Paul Wilner, poet, critic
"This is a 700-page epic evoking, invoking, claiming, declaiming, reclaiming American heroes, mythical and mystical, constructed and reconstructed." —Simon Warner, author of Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture; co-editor of Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack
