The Book of Immaculate Perception / Madrigals is a tête-bêche (flip book) by Marc Zegans and Larry Beckett in which both Madrigals by Beckett and The Book of Immaculate Perception by Zegans read from their respective fronts-to-backs in a single spine format.
The confluence between these paired chaps extends beyond shared narrative lines to independently formed yet common imagery and complementary methods of composition. In each body of work, you will find compactness of speech, form that liberates line, and an easy flow from poem-to-poem that animates and enriches the experience of reading these two sets of poems in each other's company.
About the Author :
Marc Zegans's seven collections of poems include Lyon Street (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022) and The Snow Dead (Červená Barva Press, 2020). Ghost Book (Kite String Press, 2024), a fine art photo book collaboration with photographer Tsar Fedorsky, is held in the special collections of the Boston Athenaeum, the Getty Research Institute, Yale University's Haas Family Arts Library, Haverford College, the Peabody Essex Museum, and others. Marc reviews poetry for Liberated Words in his column, "On the Cutting Edge." Films based on Marc's poems appear regularly at festivals around the world. He lives by the coast in Northern California. Larry Beckett's poetry ranges from songs to blank sonnets and 100-page narrative works. His lyric, Song to the Siren, is a modern standard. In the years since, he's written the postmodern epic, American Cycle, including the long narratives Paul Bunyan, Wyatt Earp, Amelia Earhart, and he has reinvented Sonnets. The Book of Merlin is a recovery and translation of the 6th-century Brythonic poet, and Romances Without Words / In Solitary is the first translation of the prison manuscript of Paul Verlaine. Beat Poetry is a study of the poets and poetry of the fifties San Francisco renaissance. These madrigals are to a child, from conception on.
Review :
In the stunning chapbook, The Book of Immaculate Perception / Madrigals, Marc Zegans and Larry Beckett partner to give shape and form and witness to the yet to be. Zegans' liminal spaces between light and dark are braided with Beckett's madrigals, spare, concise, and shaped with touchpoints from a horse to a murmuring tv, to the moon. In this new twist on the madrigal tradition the plaited voices form a new song in a world where Nothing stands for anything; it just is. Yet it gifts us with Your eyes light, inventing blue. An exultation, a prayer, one where the reader is invited to bring their own notes to the song.
-Ed McManis, author of Trash Truck 7:38 A.M. (And Other Love Poems).
Marc Zegans and Larry Beckett have given birth to a beautiful and moving thing. With Immaculate Perception, Zegans shows us each our personal, universal genesis story, with words as serpents, and illumination as the solvent that dissolves them (and absorbs us). In Madrigals, Beckett brings us to our senses, a world of snaking rivers and fingertips. His light is the unalloyed ecstasy of our nature. The synthesis of the two works is a truly brilliant creation.
-David Scott Ewers, author of Ultimate Resort
These two sets of poems will awake something in you. They are both a broadcast from infancy and early childhood. When you have difficulty articulating your own early childhood apprehensions, trust a poet to enable you to reach back. Like a 'Madeleine de Proust' these poems discard time and leave the reader in the nursery and the garden of child-wonder Eden. Zegans explores the soft universe of developing awareness, knowing words were stretching to be born too. A poetic masterstroke. Equally remarkable, Beckett gently plants the perspective of parent, in empathy with a child's first reaches and joys, using the madrigal, strongly associated with nature poetry. Both poems are laden with jewels of innocence. Treasure.
-Stuart Anthony, singer/songwriter, Mirabeau Bridge, Love & Trial, Though We Have Only Love: The Songs of Jacques Brel
These lucid, shimmering poems and madrigals slip in and out of the cusp where generation and perception join. Even the physical book, which can be read backwards and forwards, right-side up or upside down, invites us deeper into the liminal space between being and becoming.
-Dr. Samantha C. Harvey, professor of English at Boise State, and author of Transatlantic Transcendentalism: Coleridge, Emerson, and Nature.
The visions brilliantly gathered here by Zegans and Beckett are pointillist in how they bring the delights of discovery into a fresh and newly focused world-a joyous encounter.
-David Perkins, author of In From Forever, Post-Modern Blues, and I May or May Not Love You
It's a dialogue, it's a dance, it's a duel. In two spare, splendid sets of poetic utterance published face to face, in a single book with the split-title, Madrigals / The Book of Immaculate Perception, two poets go at it, each in his own manner, Larry Beckett's madrigals a bit more raw and ruddy, Marc Zegans' free verse more meditative and serene, both siphoning off speech, and while acknowledging the limitations of language, dare each other, and the reader, to dig deeper "in your world before words," (Beckett), to the wellspring of "Perception immaculate, yet to be." (Zegans). Drawn from a zone of knowing where, ordinarily, words dare not tread, it's the only zone worth mining.
-Peter Wortsman, poet, playwright, author of prose, long and short, real and contrived, translator and pontificator.
