"Larry Goodell is nearly legendary in New Mexico for his poems, songs, and performances. Personable, ornery, and mystical as a shovel, he has been called the Aristophanes of the juniper/pinon scrublands. Here he writes about his garden, his ditch, tending to the basics with pollen and myth. These are sonnets with roots in buttermilk sky, Gertrude Stein, and boogie woogiea selection of acrobatic verse without a net." Jeff Bryan
Larry Goodell’s work is exemplary in its sharp wistful humorous attention to the phenomena of mind and matter. If and when the species gets around to terraforming other planets, Here on Earth will be required reading for the pioneers of that enterprise. In the meantime, the rest of us are privileged to walk our minds through his garden of free-form sonnets, marveling at a flowering (but never flowery) record of brave verbal consciousness devoted to ‘this extended sentence of life,’ as it continues in the human settlement of Placitas.
Anselm Hollo
More like song-nets, they pull up treasure, fish, trinkets & surprises in about equal measure. This is colloquial American English (Spicer would have loved it) rolled into a doobie, soaked in mescal, and smoking with the wisdom of one long life lived in “that rocky place, where a trail/Changes into five or six colors” ... He is a master reader, and you have to imagine these pieces read. No, rather performed. For Larry truly breathes shape into the words. They take on attitudes. Costumes. He is their animator, as well as originator. And the tension between spoken lyric leaps and mimicked formal structure give the collection their flavor, spiced as always with the firecracker soup of Goodell’s hotpepper imagination. These are poems that insist on being heard. Where music is palpable, like the skin of yucca. Where life explodes into blossoms & thorns...
Art Goodtimes
La Alameda Press, 1996, Jeff Bryan Editor & Design
Available from Small Press Distribution http://www.spdbooks.org/
or La Alameda Press http://www.laalamedapress.com/ or Amazon Books
