Open to the street

13 September 2006

"It's like that with the truly great ones: you know immediately that you're dealing with something special, something powerful, honest, and unique that leaves no room for questioning."

Rob Woodward, author of the excellent Heaping Stones [excerpted and reviewed on Scarecrow], introduces Songs from the Shooting Gallery, Tony O'Neill's forthcoming poetry collection for Burning Shore Press.

There's one other poet I have not mentioned but whose presence I believe hangs luminously and tellingly over this work as well. When Tony first proposed SONGS FROM THE SHOOTING GALLERY as the title of this book my initial reaction was to cringe a bit: I thought it sounded kind of hokey, a touch too Walt Whitman. But after living with this title for a while I began to see that his instincts were completely on target-for like Walt Whitman, Tony O'Neill is a prophet of sort, and definitely a poet of the people. In fact, the greatest difference between these two poets, I would argue, is simply the times in which they've lived. If Walt Whitman's wide-open nineteenth-century America caused him to sing "democracy," then Tony O'Neill's constricted twenty-first century causes him to scream this concept, like a man desperate not to lose the last thread of humankind's greatest dream ... And if it sounds like I am being over the top here I assure you I am not-Tony O'Neill is that good and that important. If Walt Whitman were alive today would he be searching for a vein in a dirty depressing Hollywood motel room? I cannot answer this question. But I do believe that he would have completely understood where a poet of such a world was coming from-for Tony's journey, like Whitman's, has fundamentally been one in search of freedom, for himself, for us all ...

So what I guess I'm trying to say is that despite his place of birth and English accent, Tony O'Neill is very much an American poet, both in that this land has fundamentally shaped his vision, but also because he innately shares the best dreams that this country exudes, and therefore weeps for it people and curses its failures with the anger and hope of even its most native son. SONGS FROM THE SHOOTING GALLERY is first and foremost Tony O'Neill's song of himself, but it's also the song of an England fled and an America discovered, the song of an immigrant searching for a place to be. And it is this, my fellow Americans, that makes it our song too, the song we all sing each day in our own way ...