Book review #29: Song to the Siren

Alarm bells sound but music in the air

Song to the Siren by Larry Beckett (Halbaffe Press, 2024)

By Jonah Raskin

THE MUSIC ON the radio Saturday night put me in a head space to appreciate Larry Beckett’s latest book, which reverses the expected pattern. The siren usually does the singing. Here she is the listener. I was streaming KWMR and bopping and hopping to Little Richard, Janis Joplin and a host of blues men and women and classic rock‘n’rollers I first heard in high school in the 1950s when I also first read the Beats.

Words and tunes inform almost all of Beckett’s enduring works and especially Song to the Siren, which is arranged in seven sections, beginning with ‘The Outcast’ and ending with ‘Music’. In-between there’s ‘All American’, ‘My Companion’ and ‘Old Beauty’, which features songs titled ‘Elvis Presley’ and ‘John Lennon’, plus two other subheadings, ‘Blue Night’ and ‘Noah’s Dove’.

Pictured above: By air and sea – Larry Beckett’s new volume Song to the Siren

The night is almost always blue in Beckett’s world while the waters are often rising or falling. The end is near and so is genesis. ‘John Lennon’ begins with the lines ‘We listen to old rock-and-roll’ and includes the plaintiff refrain, ‘Oh, where’s John’. Presumably in Beatles heaven.

Not every song in Song to the Siren offers rhymes, but most of them do. In ‘Morning Glory’, Beckett rhymes ‘climb’ and ‘grime’ and, in ‘Rimbaud’s Geisha’, ‘town’ follows ‘down’ and ‘ocean’ bounces off ‘devotion’.

Sex raises its steamy head, along with four-letter words such as ‘f—k’, in ‘Love’s Outlaws’ and in ‘Blue Night’ with its stunning fourth stanza that begins, ‘The mattress is our island/and the radio our god’.

Yes, Beckett can be down and dirty as well as squeaky clean and practically spiritual  when it comes to sex. His songs transport readers across the great expanse of North America with stops in Los Angeles and Tijuana, Brooklyn and New Orleans, birthplace of the blues.

Still, the feelings and sentiments are universal rather than provincial and nationalistic. The songs obey no lawful boundaries but rather leap across the frontiers of time and space and collapse the contemporary world with antiquity. Beckett’s words dance right off the page.

I especially love ‘I Love a Waitress’, in which Huck Finn hopes to ‘learn to play ragtime piano’ and Hamlet sits at his ‘desk, grinding out a good sonnet’ –Shakespearian no doubt. Beckett wears his literary passions lightly but firmly.

The notes at the back of the book explain, for example, that ‘Blue Night’ ‘offers allusions to Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘A Vindication of the False Basilides’ (you’ll have to Google that word!), and that ‘Music’ makes links to Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. Beckett is rarely strays far from the fields of myth and legend, whether those of the ancient Greeks or far more recent writers such as Dante, Herman Melville and Charles Dickens.

Beckett’s a guy poet (a he/ him) and writes verse that will likely turn on guys, but I imagine that women will also respond well to his explorations into the universe of sex and love and his poetic excursions into bedrooms in which ‘the mattress’ is an ‘island’ and the only ‘kingdom’ the singer knows. Lovers will know what he means.

In a blurb at the front of the book Peter Buck of REM writes of Beckett, ‘His work has meant much to me through the years. I can only hope that his writing will have the same effect on you.’ A songwriter who collaborated with Tim Buckley, Beckett draws here on that history and that relationship and fine tunes it.

Pictured above: Larry Beckett and band in action at a recent book launch at LA’s Beyond Baroque. Image by Laura Fletcher, also lead portrait

In a note towards the end of the collection, he explains that ‘music is a song cycle’ and that the word ‘music’ comes from ‘muse’, the goddess who inspires. It’s a useful reminder for those who already knew and a wake up call for those who haven’t known. A six-page-plus discography provides most useful background information about the history of the songs.

I have been a Beckett fan ever since I first read his bold and magnificent American Cycle, which was published in 2021. In Song to the Siren, he again takes big risks and, like Icarus, son of Daedalus, flies dangerously close to the sun.

Unlike Icarus, Beckett survives his journey into the fires of sex, love and creativity. By taking those risks he reaps rich rewards which he shares with readers/listeners who might be glued to their radios or listening to the blues and rock on the records and tapes they play in their heads, that broadcast to and bounce off the stars and return to earth again.