With the publication of "Songs and Sonnets," Larry Beckett emerges from the shadows of rock history as a 21st century troubadour. Known to '60s and '70s music fans as a collaborator with the late folk-rock singer Tim Buckley (notably for his lyrics to "Goodbye and Hello"), he has been quietly accumulating these poems over the past 25 years.
Beckett embodies the poet as lover. But these are no embowered odes to private joys and sorrows. Instead, he shares a love that partakes of the world,
through custom-made songs, madrigals and an unrhymed version of the Petrarchan sonnet. Although refraining from "poetic" archaisms such as "thy" and "shouldst," he successfully incorporates the lyrical "ohs" and "ahs" that work in sung performances but can seem cloying on the page, or even when spoken. Otherwise, although the likes of Dante and Arnaut have influenced his feel for words and form, they are perhaps more important as kindred lovers.
Beckett's linguistic music is his own, even when he alludes to Homer ("Oh Helen, I was stuck/ in an epic poem ten aching years, you can't/ say she was air"). He dives into the landscape of the opening sonnet much as he later confesses -- or brags -- that "I don't hug you, I barge/ into your arms and pump you for hallelujahs."
Against variegated backdrops, from baseball games and Shakespeare plays in America and London, to a Paris of "whores leaning/ in the alleys, crude beauties," the couple's love flourishes and languishes. "Songs and Sonnets" charts the course of a passionately thorny marriage with funky grace and tenderness.
Alexandra Yurkovsky
