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Rating: 
Summary: A book that has haunted me
Review: I have been waiting to get this book for over 10 years, and it is well worth the wait I endured!I first read Frank Stanford and an exerpt from The Battlefield when I purchased the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Anthology. I was immediately captured by the immense narrative form that I found. I later bought The Light the Dead See and was amazed yet again. Upon finally getting my hands on this book I can say without a doubt that I am in love with the words of Frank Stanford. The new edition is not 542 pages long, but this is a result of the enlarged book format that the publishers chose. However, the poem is a single, 15,000+ line stanza of poetry that can seem most daunting any way you look at it. What got me going is my anticipation. I just dove into the book and didn't look back. Within the narrative, you find Francis, who is an amazing guide through a rural, Southern landscape, filled with adventure and figurative language that at times cause me to catch my breath. Francis narrates from both an observational and personal point of view, and it is up to the reader to catch up with him. At times he is telling you what happened to him, what he heard about someone else, what he was/is dreaming, and what he plans on doing. The text is full of allusions and references to other epic stories. Francis and the events and people who surround him culminate with these allusions into an Epic for the modern reader. At times the writing looks too unorganized to be an epic, but this is not the case. I am convinced that Stanford knew what he was doing every single line and word of the way. This truly is poetry with every line a composition in itself. At every turn of the page there is a new secret, a new wonderful discovery to be found. I urge you to read this book and help to re-discover a lost American poet. I was so impressed, I bought a second copy as a gift and would not hesitate to do so again for the right person.
Rating:
Summary: you'd need a sixth or seventh star for this one
Review: the book is simply massive music... Robert Johnson's lost Gregorian chants scored by Beethoven... performed as if Wynton Kelly was Chopin's shadow figure (or vice versa)... gorgeous and blood-soaked in an unbroken swipe of the scythe from blues to beatitude and back... go toe to toe or eye to eye with a few thousand lines in a sit and see if you don't go down and get up more than what you thought you were... among many many other things an EKG taken from an unplugged guitar dragged down a dirt road a double-play turned with a grenade thrown through the open window of a freedom ride bus an unbroken polygraph run off the scales by the polarities of race in the centrifuge of American consciousness...
Rating:
Summary: Ain't been done since.
Review: There's no fooling in Stanford's poetry, no cheap catharsis, no worn-out middle class longing. Like the wide, roiling waters on a flood plain, Stanford's work stops you dead. The road disappears, submerged for a hundred yards or more before bobbing up from the water's edge, crawling on. Do you drive across? You think you know the road well. It is only poetry, after all.
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