Forever Words: The Unknown Poems
₱1,356.00
Product Description
These never-before-published poems by Johnny Cash make the perfect gifts for music lovers and fans alike. Edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon with a foreword by John Carter Cash, this poetry collection is illustrated with facsimile reproductions of Cash’s own handwritten pages. Now an album with music by Rosanne Cash, Brad Paisley, Willie Nelson, Kacey Musgraves, Elvis Costello, and more.
Since his first recordings in 1955, Johnny Cash has been an icon in the music world. In this collection of poems and song lyrics that have never been published before, we see the world through his eyes and view his reflection on his own interior reality, his frailties and his strengths alike. In his hallmark voice, he pens verses about love, pain, freedom, and mortality, and expresses insights on culture, his family, his fame, even Christmas.
Forever Words confirms Johnny Cash as a brilliant and singular American literary figure. His music is a part of our collective history, and here the depth of his artistry and talent become even more evident.
Review
“The Man in Black was also an incredibly productive poet who was just as happy to let his pen do the talking….Love, mortality, addiction, humor, spirituality, pain, wonder, hope, heartbreak, freedom and resignation all weave in and out of Cash’s poetry – just as they did in his songs – in an attempt to paint the most accurate portrait of his true self.”
—Will Hodge, Rollingstone.com
“In some ways the poems mirror Cash’s songwriting, with terse ballads of outsiders in love, and parables drawn from the Bible…yet another look at a legend of American music.”
—Ben Sisario, The New York Times“In retrospect, we should have assumed that outlaw country musician Johnny Cash was leading a double life as a secret poet.”
—Dennis DiClaudio, The A.V. Club
About the Author
JOHNNY CASH (1932–2003) was an American icon and country music superstar. He performed everywhere from Folsom State Prison to the White House. In 1980 he became the youngest living person to be chosen for the Country Music Hall of Fame; he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1977, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2010. A recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors as well as the National Medal of Arts, he won nineteen Grammy Awards, four of them posthumously.
PAUL MULDOON is the author of twelve collections of verse, including
Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor at Princeton University, and between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Since 2007, Muldoon has been poetry editor of
The New Yorker. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Foreword: Redemptions
My father had many faces. There was much that made up the man. If you think you “know” John R Cash, think again. There are many layers, so much beneath the surface.
First, I knew him to be fun. Within the first six years of my life, if asked what Dad was to me I would have emphatically responded: “Dad is fun!” This was my simple foundation for my enduring relationship with my father.
This is the man he was. He never lost this.
To those who knew him well-family, friends, coworkers alike-the one essential thing that was blazingly evident was the light and laughter within my father’s heart. Typically, though his common image may be otherwise, he was not heavy and dark, but loving and full of color.
Yet there was so much more . . .
For one thing-he was brilliant. He was a scholar, learned in ancient texts, including those of Flavius Josephus and unquestionably of the Bible. He was an ordained minister and could easily hold his own with any theologian. His books on ancient history, such as Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fa
