Eight extended poems from the acclaimed author of On the Road and Big Sur —featuring an introduction by Robert Creeley   Best known for his “Legend of Duluoz” novels, Jack Kerouac is also an important poet. In the eight poems collected in Book of Blues , Kerouac writes from the heart of experience in the music of language, employing the same instrumental blues form that he used to fullest effect in Mexico City Blues , his largely unheralded classic of postmodern literature.   “In my system, the form of blues choruses is limited by the small page of the breastpocket notebook in which they are written, like the form of a set number of bars in a jazz blues chorus, and so sometimes the word-meaning can carry from one chorus into another, or not, just like the phrase-meaning can carry harmonically from one chorus to another, or not, in jazz, so that, in these blues as in jazz, the form is determined by time, and by the musician’s spontaneous phrasing & harmonizing with the beat of time as if waves & waves on by in measured choruses.” —Jack Kerouac   These poems include:   • San Francisco Blues • Richmond Hill Blues • Bowery Blues • MacDougal Street Blues • Desolation Blues • Orizaba 210 Blues • Orlanda Blues • Cerrada Medellin Blues Edited by Kerouac himself, Book of Blues is an exuberant foray into language and consciousness, rich with imagery, propelled by rhythm, and based in a reverent attentiveness to the moment. Kerouac's poetry is oddly appealing, even when it isn't very good, which is often in this collection of "blues"?sequences of song-poems rooted in urban locales that range from San Francisco to Mexico City. The given limitation of each short poem is the size of a page in the poet's tiny notebook; in each sequence, a thread is carried over from one poem to the next, like song verses or diary entries interrupted by drink or sleep. Best known, of course, for his 1957 novel, On the Road, Kerouac always seems to be on the move. From the Bowery to Mexico City, he sketches what he sees: his vision is permeated with booze, suffering, and an admirable drive to get it all down on paper. His faith in the redemptive act of writing is particularly refreshing at this time of conservative backlash against the arts. These previously unpublished poems annoy and amuse and occasionally relax into beauty: "And raindrops/that don't know/You've been deceived/Slide on iron/Raggedly gloomy." For subject collections.?Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. Gaps in Kerouac's complex and sonorous canon are being filled in slowly but surely. Last winter brought his Selected Letters and The Portable Jack Kerouac , and now we have this set of eight previously unpublished "blues" poems written between 1954 and 1961. These long poems, series of "choruses" or sketches, resemble, in form and avidity, Kerouac's amazing verse creation Mexico City Blues (1959). They are strongly tied to place and are, as the allusion to music implies, boldly improvisational. Kerouac finds and breaks connections between images and observations as he channels the energy of San Francisco, New York, Washington, and various Mexican towns and cities into great rushes of language. As he riffs and indulges in easy wordplay, Kerouac can be either astute or sloppy, visionary or banal, but, as Robert Creeley writes in his fine introduction, his poems "provide an intensely vivid witness of both writer and time." Whatever their failings, these scintillating poems will strike a chord with fans of performance poetry or even rap, as well as with Kerouac enthusiasts. Donna Seaman Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City , appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road , published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums , The Subterraneans , and Big Sur . Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend . He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.