Song to the Siren is the best of Larry Beckett's lyrics of the past fifty years, conceived as poems that can be sung. Most have been set to music and recorded. It includes every kind of lyric: ode, cycle, carol, hymn, ballad, serenade, erotica, blason, aria, blues, lullaby, elegy. Song to the Siren itself, written with Tim Buckley in the sixties, is a modern standard, recorded by This Mortal Coil, Robert Plant, Bryan Ferry, George Michael, Sinead O'Connor, Kitty Macfarlane, and over a hundred other musicians. It's been played in a number of film soundtracks: Moonlight Mile, Lost Highway, The Lovely Bones, Justice League. This is its first publication. The book includes an appendix with music sources and recording history for each lyric, and an essay on the genesis of Song to the Siren.

Merlin was a 6th-century poet in northwest Britain, who spoke the Brythonic tongue. He was known as Myrddin Wyllt, or Merlin of the Wilds. He was a contemporary and comrade of Taliesin, and though The Book of Taliesin is extant, for Merlin, there are only a handful of poems in The Black Book of Carmarthen, The Red Book of Hergest, and other middle Welsh texts. But scholars have suggested that Merlin’s other lyrics were embedded in the Latin poem Vita Merlini by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Together, they tell of Merlin’s later life. This translation is the first time that his surviving words have been gathered in one manuscript since The Book of Merlin was lost in the 12th century.oes here

A sequence of long poems inspired by our folklore and past, its sytles deeply connected to American speech. The Cycle’s themes are love, local mythology, history, justice, memory, accomplishment, time. Plot, as a literary device, is replaced with life, and character, with the universe inside. I hear America singing, the varied carols…

Forgoing the myths, wordsmith Larry Beckett skirts the overwrought icon and gives us instead the aches, loves, and morals of the flesh-and-blood human. In striking prose poetry that makes use of Earp’s own words, Beckett has gotten to the humanity behind the folklore.

This is the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 50s, reconsidered as literature: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s lyrical cityscapes, Jack Kerouac’s blues and haikus, Allen Ginsberg’s saxophone prophecies, Gregory Corso’s obsessive odes, John Wieners’ true confessions, Michael McClure’s physical hymns, Philip Lamantia’s surreal passions, Gary Snyder’s work songs, Philip Whalen’s loose sutras, Lew Welch’s hermit visions, David Meltzer’s improvisations and discoveries, and Bob Kaufman’s jazz meditations.

A ghost-woman’s ruminations on the joys & injustices of her life fly through her memory:

Rhapsodic & reportorial by turns, Amelia Earhart sets the mythological image of the first famous female aviator against her own musings on the facts of her life. The result is an epic monologue that reveals not only Earhart but also Larry Beckett’s genius for making words dance, for Amelia & for us.

Drawing on logger folklore, James Stevens’ stories, and the Davy Crockett almanacs, Larry Beckett’s poem is a modern epic in `long-winded’ blank verse. MP3 CD enclosed.

Larry Beckett’s long-awaited first book, Songs and Sonnets, was written over a 26-year period. His blank verse sonnets and madrigals center on marriage in our time; these poems trace love day-to-day, with music and intensity.