Publisher's Synopsis
Reading is believing: The star of this duet is the author's "27" coming of age novel, written nights among moths and ghosts in an old Hitler-era army barracks to strains of Mozart. He was a young U.S. Army soldier, stationed in 1970s West Germany during the Cold War. Captured together after forty years gathering dust - twins separated at birth and reunited nearly a half century later - these two books will amaze you with their magic, beauty, melancholy, and passion. The author wrote poetry with talent and discipline through his teens and twenties, a published poet at 18 who flared out at 27 and left the select poetry of a finished career eclipsed in obscurity. He became a professional writer at 17 as a summer interne newspaper reporter in New Haven, and a starving novelist in his early 20s before hitching and driving across the USA (among many adventures) and settling in San Diego, from where he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Stationed in West Germany, he owned an orange VW van and traveled extensively with many adventures. At the same time, like all G.I.s, he was lonely and missed *the World* as troops far from home call the USA. He would return to the barracks alone at night - when all was still, under the lantern of Lili Marlene - and play Mozart while reimagining lives and loves of a past half memory and half myth. The poems and the novel he wrote among moths and ghosts are still fresh and readable today - presented here, for the first time, in a single volume together. The novel On Saint Ronan Street is a nostalgic retrospective on his lost past in New Haven - wellspring of his poetic art; and its women, his first loves. Titled cryptically Jon+Merile in manuscript, and left to gather dust for 40 years, it is the story of a 23 year old poet's wild love affair with the beautiful, neglected young professor's wife in a New England college town. The poems: The second book in this volume (Cymbalist Poems) contains the author's collected favorite poems from among hundreds written in over a decade, before his lyric flare-out at 27. He was a published poet and professional journalist at 18; a serious writer through his teens and twenties. Like the mythological "27" when rock stars crash and burn, other creative souls undergo a life change in their late twenties as well. In this author's life, he turned his passion and talent to writing prose. In these two books, the poetry resonates in the narrative, while each poem offers an intriguing glimpse of myth and story. In the novel, talented, passionate, and handsome 23 year old poet Jon Harney graduated from a small college, and is now mowing lawns and doing other odd jobs around Yale University while showing his verse portfolio to New York City publishers. He meets a lonely young woman, Merile Doherty (pronounced like 'Merrill' for reasons revealed). She beautiful, intriguing, and fun. Merile's husband Bill is an archeologist at Yale University. Bill is older and colder, vacant at affection, always gone, never quite there for her. He is Absent Without Emotional Leave (AWEL). When Merile and Jon meet, she's been alone again for too long. Bill is far off in Australia digging for bones - and also digging chicks in Sydney. He phones to tell her he has fallen in love with an Australian woman, and is going to leave Merile. That's before he calls to tell her he isn't. That's how it goes. Merile is vulnerable and Jon Harney is smitten. Their chemistry is incendiary. Like hungry young wolves, they can't get enough of each other. Their mad, passionate love affair is as glorious as it is doomed. In this 27duet, the author's twin books - separated at birth - are finally united after forty years gathering dust. The light that shines half as long shines twice as bright, to paraphrase Roy in Blade Runner. The author's light continues to shine, in another century and another life (see the Amazon author pages for Jean-Thomas Cullen, John T. Cullen, and John Argo).
