BOOKS

Here Comes the Old Man Now

Poems by John Perrault
Publisher: Oyster River Press, Durham , NH
Paper, $15.00 (includes shipping and handling)
© John Perrault, 2005

What People are saying about Here Comes the Old Man Now

For those who've heard John Perrault as a singer/songwriter, his lyrics sound like poems. For those who've known him as a poet, his poems sing. Perrault brings a range of quirky lyric autobiography of a place and time. He writes of love and pleasure; of loss and death and hope: in the privacy of rooms; in our own country's public squares and fields and woods; in the churchyards and streets and cafés of foreign countries. His poems are heart-felt, unsentimental; tender, muscular. They are political and deeply personal. To read these poems is to realize that someone is trying to understand. In these times, that's a rare comfort

    --Marie Harris

John Perrault's book arrived on the first really Arctic day of the winter, and I read it at one sitting in a warm corner. John is a songbird/troubadour, with news from all over. His lyrical delineations of home and hearth and family form the base from which he then departs-- whether to stormy Maine coasts, to the Paris of heritage, to the Argentina of the disappeared, to sunny isles or the scared and measuring solitudes of great wildernesses, all his dispatches resound against the base: home, hearth, and the family around us and before and after us. The book is such an affirmation of what I believe and what I cherish and foster, I shall need multiple copies. It has to be kept safe at hand, and it has to be widely shared.

Here Comes the Old Man Now begins with an epigraph from Bernart de Ventadorn that says in part: "It is worthless to write a line if the song proceed not from the heart." John Perrault's short, mostly lyrical poems are, indeed, "poems from the heart." These small poems cover a wide territory: poems of family, of aging, of relationships, poems of war, of art, disaster, and grief. The landscapes range from the North Country to Paris, Sanibel, Grenada, across the world. They are sad poems, humorous poems and all the states of emotion in-between. What holds them together in this fine book is the delicacy and craft with which they were made, the search for consolations that may not even be possible, and the spirit inside them that arrows at us straight from the heart. This book is a delight, hold it close, savor it. I think you will want to read it again and again.

The Ballad of Louis Wagner and other New England Stories in Verse

Ten ballads, five songs, fifteen poems by John Perrault with photographs by Peter Randall. Includes CD of the ballads and songs by John Perrault. Text © John Perrault., 2003.
Publisher: Peter Randall Publisher, Portsmouth NH
Cloth, $25.00 (includes shipping and handling)

"John Perrault's ballads are a combination of poetry and grit."
     --Marie Harris, Your Sun, Manny; Weasel in the Turkey Pen; Raw Honey

"John's 'Ballad of Louis Wagner' is the best story song I've ever heard."
    --Ernest Hebert, The Dogs of March; Whisper My Name; The Old American

"In his ballads John Perrault reveals an acuity about human nature and the reconciling wisdom that opens it up to others with jolts of crusty lascivious humor that only a true-bred Easterner can bring off. And with the enclosed CD you learn Perrault sings as "bad" as Dylan."
    --Larry Woiwode, Beyond the Bedroom Wall; Indian Affairs; What I Think I Did

To order by mail, please list titles and forward check or money order for price(s) indicated made out to Rockweed Music / Publishing, PO Box 329, No. Hampton , NH 03862-0329