Twenty First Century Blues

“Twenty First Century Blues speaks to all of us whose lives fall short of the triumphs we had planned. Yet the jaundice in Richard Cecil’s eye is offset by clear vision. This book tells bitter truths, redeemed by memory, by wit, by craft, by accurate and resonant details. These poems say ‘I came, I saw, I did not conquer, exactly, but I understood, I laughed, I celebrated by writing this down.’”

—Charles Harper Webb

“Richard Cecil’s most distinguished poems range persistently along, accumulating data until patterns and conclusions that have been latent become apparent. Again and again a faith in the lurking significance of things pays off, and the early particulars add up to revelation.”—William Stafford

“Cecil’s poems are powerful, moving, and original. There is clarity, honesty, and delightful quirkiness. He captures—he recaptures—the human situation. He is just as shocking, radical, and aggravating, in his way, as language poets, for instance, are in theirs. He makes it almost possible—let me say possible—for a well-educated generalist to read poetry again.”—Gerald Stern

 

“Cecil suggests metaphorically his pursuit of all things deemed precious and abandoned or lost. It is a serious theme, and a difficult one to carry off, but Cecil does it again and again, looking squarely into the depths of experience with a great dry wit, and without resorting to nostalgia. . . . Perhaps no poet since Larkin has treated the romance of hope to such a helping of irony and come off in the barely possible human affirmative.”—Rodney Jones

 

“The technical skill and humor on display . . . make it likely that Cecil’s poems will be read long after he joins that ever-longer roll call of poets who have passed on.”

—Al Maginnes, Quarterly West