Overview

""The sixth-century world of the poet called Merlin of the Wilds is one of sharp contrasts: savage battles and rivalries are set against natural beauties part homely and part magical. It's a world in which the role of the poet is not just to sing but to prophesy to kings. Larry Beckett's renderings of Merlin's world and words, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, are richly sonic and songlike, full of refrains, repetends, pulsing four-beat lines, and musical Welsh names. They make a distant world-picture-and a poet's enigmatic life-tangible for us, in laments and foretellings, histories and prayers."" - Maryann Corbett, winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize .

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9781604893588

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Reviews

"""What magic this! Larry Beckett's enthralling first contemporary translation of Merlin's poems makes live and present-from Brythonic voice, whose tongue gave rise to Britain-a time before our ken. With surety and pluck, this poet-translator moves Merlin to the center of the song-wild-man and prophetic bard, peer to Taliesen-bringing forth the blood, anguish, lust, and fury of this ancient shapeshifter, so different from the genial wizard of popular imagination. Highly readable, fully imagined, sharp and untamed, Beckett's brilliant act of translation conjures Merlin's voice and his world to perfection."" - Marc Zegans, author of Lyon Street, and The Snow Dead ""An imaginative attempt to recreate a non-existent book. While Beckett's poems are written in a modern diction and metre, their cadence and syntax manage to suggest poems written in another language in a distant past. If the real Myrddin Wyllt had written poems in modern English, they might have read like these."" - Dr. Liam Guilar, author of A Presentment of Englishry and A Man of Heart ""This is an outstanding collection. In twenty-four pointed monologues and dialogues, Merlin, the war-worn recluse, laments his lost companions and his own fate. Deftly shaping his fast-moving modern verse with features of traditional Welsh forms, Larry Beckett revives the dead and foretells their future with regret, wit, and defiance."" - William G. Carpenter, author of E�andun: Epic Poem"

"""What magic this! Larry Beckett's enthralling first contemporary translation of Merlin's poems makes live and present-from Brythonic voice, whose tongue gave rise to Britain-a time before our ken. With surety and pluck, this poet-translator moves Merlin to the center of the song-wild-man and prophetic bard, peer to Taliesen-bringing forth the blood, anguish, lust, and fury of this ancient shapeshifter, so different from the genial wizard of popular imagination. Highly readable, fully imagined, sharp and untamed, Beckett's brilliant act of translation conjures Merlin's voice and his world to perfection."" - Marc Zegans, author of Lyon Street, and The Snow Dead ""An imaginative attempt to recreate a non-existent book. While Beckett's poems are written in a modern diction and metre, their cadence and syntax manage to suggest poems written in another language in a distant past. If the real Myrddin Wyllt had written poems in modern English, they might have read like these."" - Dr. Liam Guilar, author of A Presentment of Englishry and A Man of Heart ""This is an outstanding collection. In twenty-four pointed monologues and dialogues, Merlin, the war-worn recluse, laments his lost companions and his own fate. Deftly shaping his fast-moving modern verse with features of traditional Welsh forms, Larry Beckett revives the dead and foretells their future with regret, wit, and defiance."" - William G. Carpenter, author of EÞandun: Epic Poem"

Author Information

Larry Beckett's poetry ranges from songs, Song to the Siren, to blank sonnets, Songs and Sonnets, to the epic American Cycle, including Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp, Amelia Earhart, and seven other book-length poems. Beat Poetry is a study of the poets and poetry of the fifties San Francisco renaissance.

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