Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics, 1965-1999

by Adrian Mitchell (Editor), Adrian Mitchell (Editor), Paul McCartney (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.82

  In his introduction to Paul McCartney's work Adrian Mitchell advises: 'Clean out your head. Wash out the name and the fame. Read these clear words and listen to them decide for yourself. Paul is not in the line of academic poets or modernist poets. He is a popular poet.' To many readers some of this book will be instantly recognisable as the songs that have formed the backdrop to every generation since the 1960s. Their lyrics have been learned, almost subliminally, by heart; 'Eleanor rigby', 'Band on the Run', 'She's Leaving Home,' 'Penny Lane'...But among the familiar are poems that have never before been seen. Sharing the preccupations of the songs and including moving elegies to Paul's wife, Linda, they give us unique access to the inner life of one of the most influential figures in popular culture of the last fifty years. They demonstrate, against an acknowledgement of the essential solitariness of existence, an irrepressible belief in the power of words and music to make things better.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.88

  Electric Light travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding - whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry. Electric Light ranges from short takes ('glosses') to conversation poems whose cunning passagework gives rein to 'the must and drift of talk'; other poems are arranged in sections, their separate cargoes docked alongside each other to reveal a hidden and curative connection. The presocratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the fixities of remembrance: elegising friends and fellow poets, naming 'the real names' of contemporaries behind the Shakespearean roles they played at school. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign to things their proper names. The resulting poems are full of delicately prescriptive tonalities, where Heaney can be heard extending his word-hoard and rollcall in this, his eleventh collection.

• New

  Paperback
  2001

  $12.91

  Electric Light travels widely in time and space, visiting the sites of the classical world, revisiting the poet's childhood: rural electrification and the light of ancient evenings are reconciled within the orbit of a single lifetime. This is a book about origins (not least the origins of words) and oracles: the places where things start from, the ground of understanding - whether in Arcadia or Anahorish, the sanctuary at Epidaurus or the Bann valley in County Derry. Electric Light ranges from short takes ('glosses') to conversation poems whose cunning passagework gives rein to 'the must and drift of talk'; other poems are arranged in sections, their separate cargoes docked alongside each other to reveal a hidden and curative connection. The presocratic wisdom that everything flows is held in tension with the fixities of remembrance: elegising friends and fellow poets, naming 'the real names' of contemporaries behind the Shakespearean roles they played at school. These gifts of recollection renew the poet's calling to assign to things their proper names. The resulting poems are full of delicately prescriptive tonalities, where Heaney can be heard extending his word-hoard and rollcall in this, his eleventh collection.