From the beginning, the Beatles announced their debt to Black music in interviews, recording covers and original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating unacknowledged forerunners, as well as Black artists whose interpretations keep the Beatles in play. Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today. Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you’ll never hear “Blackbird”—and the Beatles—the same way again.

Cyrus Cassells, a masterful poet and translator, has created a unique and powerful hybrid translation/poetic homage to Catalunya’s great twentieth-century poet Salvador Espriu. The lion’s share of To the Cypress Again and Again is a supple translation of Espriu’s first book, Sinera Cemetery, along with selections from other collections. A reader will come away with a poignant sense of Espriu’s beloved seaside landscape as well as, in Espriu’s words, his “precious Catalan’s/ mysterious gold”: a language that was suppressed and forbidden under Franco’s regime. Cassells has given us an enduring gift to the memory of Espriu—through his personal introduction, his loving translations, followed by his own Espriu-inspired poems that evoke “an alphabet of cypresses and sea-light,” thus transmuting Espriu’s elegiac voice into Cassells’s own.

From the beginning, the Beatles announced their debt to Black music in interviews, recording covers and original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating unacknowledged forerunners, as well as Black artists whose interpretations keep the Beatles in play. Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today. Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you’ll never hear “Blackbird”—and the Beatles—the same way again.

Soul Make a Path Through Shouting is Cyrus Cassells' second book. His first, The Mud Actor, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Al Young in 1982. Enriched both mythologically and experientially by world travels, Cassells makes the vital journey inward, a search for spiritual grace among "hen feathers, rubble, shards of broken dolls" in Afghanistan or among the vantage-points of the Pyrenees. He draws with equal ease from classical Greek mythology and experientially by his world travels, oral traditions, and others, and the result is an often hypnotic and rhapsodic interweaving of dramatic narratives forming a single whole. He celebrates the dignity and courage of a girl on her way to school in 1957, knowing as only an authentic poet can, that this is the real history, the real and necessary song of a world. Soul Make a Path Through Shouting is a virtuoso performance.

Cyrus Cassells' vibrant translations grow on the page as though the essence of Francesc Parcerisas' work has also moved forward in a Janus-like fashion. These translations are not simply the same poems in a different language; Cassells has crafted new poetry. The gentle and delicate rhythms of Parcerisas have been contracted into shorter lines that explore sharper cadences whilst Cassells carefully maintains a sensitive continuity in the opening feet. This is poetry for the ear first and the page second, Cassells has stronger consonants at his disposal, a resource that he skilfully exploits. The ultimate product of his labours is a short collection of poetry that reads and feels like a work of English Literature, a sensation that is perhaps the highest compliment one may bestow upon a Literary Translation.

Cyrus Cassells' fourth volume of poetry is an elegiac "book of heroes," a lyric homage to the "artistic fathers" who taught him "the truth-or-bust beauty of passion transformed / into sheer compassion."

In the wake of his father's death, Cassells returned to Italy, France and Spain, countries that nurtured him as a young writer, to investigate the sources of his inspiration. Vincent Van Gogh, Cesare Pavese, Eugenio Montale, Attilio and Bernardo Bertolucci, and GarcA-a Lorca are among those invoked and revisited in order to brace Cassells through his mourning, and to serve as touchstones in his search for the meaning of gallantry and quest for courage and expression.

Throughout his travels-and especially while contemplating flamenco culture-Cassells experiences the juxtaposition of mourning with unanticipated gusts of love and eroticism. Lush Andalusian-based poems emphasize the present's power for surprise and renewal, while his elegies are ecstatic, erotic and sometimes comic. Questing and elemental, elegantly lyrical, "More Than Peace and Cypresses" arcs beyond grief to celebrate the fleeting majesty of our lives.

From "Way of the Duende":

"The day mind gone, Lord,
and all the stringencies,
the day's bright yokes, the day's heavy
bridles of status:
flamenco as an impassioned
celebration of night,
of duende, of mystery's
warrens and arabesques"-"
Romans, Carthaginians, phantom
Moors wander through the redemptive,
incantatory dancing"-

Cyrus Cassells' previous books have earned the William Carlos Williams award, a Lambda Book Award, and a selection as "Best of the Year" by "Publishers Weekly." He teaches at Southwest Texas State University and lives in Austin, Texas.

Consisting of two dynamic song cycles, Cyrus Cassells's sixth poetry volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, keeps the reader on edge with a timeless and beguiling feast of language that fuses together history, memory, and family. The first cycle, rooted in the culture of the Gullah people of Charleston and the Sea Islands, celebrates the resilience of the rice- and indigo-working slaves and their descendants who have forged a unique Africa-inspired language and culture. Set against a Mediterranean backdrop, the second cycle explores themes of pilgrimage, love, and loss, concluding with a pair of elegies to the poet's mother and the many men lost in the juggernaut of the AIDS crisis. Throughout, Cassells invites the reader to consider the duality of grief and love, as well as the shifting connections between past and present. Cassells's language is always striking, unpredictable, and beautiful, conjuring a world not only of "placid seagulls perched / in priest-gentle pines / like festive Christmas ornaments" but also one where "Death prevailed, / tireless as a forest partisan." His poems transport the reader across time, space, and language, searching constantly not just for empathy but also for the human spirit in its triumph, for "our human joy, / laced with an ageless grieving."

The Mud Actor finds its most powerful images in the poems of childhood and in the moving poem, "The Memory of Hiroshima" . . . Cassells' ultimate testimony to the human spirit. The cumulative nature of the book is powerful, and allows us to agree with the poet at the end that 'Everything in life is resurrection'.