1969 AND OTHER POEMS

No one talks the talk, or walks the walk like Fred Byrnes. The poems in this powerful collection are not sweet lullabies sung to suckling babies. Instead, they are swift, sharp jabs to the jaw, pounding left hooks to the body; and knockout right crosses to the temple that take your breath away and leave you gasping for more. Leonard Greco, author of Brooklyn Born    

If, as they say, to know of life one must first understand the beating of the human heart, the Fred Byrnes is the best damn cardiologist I've ever met and a hell of a poet. Matt Rodman, founder of Podium  

           Fred Byrnes       

  Fred Byrnes’ poetry is poignant and desperately honest. This collection has a rippling effect, by way of vignettes mirroring personal perspective. Byrnes revels in fearless awareness of pain, echoing a turbulent world. Anna DiBella, Past National President, National League of American Pen Women  

Byrnes’ subject is frequently the suburbia we deny exists. His direct language and rhythms affirm the humble dignity of the disenfranchised and skewer the hypocritical. These poems will make you laugh at our idiosyncrasies and mourn our stupidity. Dan Giancola, author of  The Window Washer and Other Work Poems  

Reading a Fred Byrnes poem is like taking a walk in a neighborhood where people are known inside and out, where streets go back and forward in time. The beat—mimetic as heartbreak—meters lines as raw as sad reality. Graham Everett, founder of Street Press  

Fred Byrnes is an American Original. A gifted poet and fiction writer—like Brautigan and Jack Kerouac he admires in his poetry—Fred’s not afraid to ”put it to paper” and thus, he is one true voice for us all. David Axelrod, Suffolk County Poet Laureate   

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

             Fred Byrnes continues to live in Huntington Station , Long Island , New York , his hometown.  He holds a degree in Communications from Suffolk College , Selden , and a Bachelors of Arts in English from Dowling College , Oakdale , New York . 

            While at Dowling, Byrnes taught creative writing at the Hausman Center for Disabled Students.  Byrnes recalls the workshop, “as one of the more honest efforts of my life.”  1969 and Other Poems is Fred’s eighth collection. 

PREFACE to the book 

by George Wallace  

            If Freddy Byrnes were your average ‘Peri-Millennial’ poet, sensitive and inquisitive and well- schooled in the art of New Age self-explication, this might have been a book steeped in the incense of Taoist thinking, offering a series of reflective poems that explore the harmonic yin-yang balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil.

            I do not know whether Freddy ever studied Eastern philosophy. But I do know he is a man who has lived much, suffered innocently, and survived. A man who knows darkness from the light.

            A simple and personal tragedy defies easy explaining. Oh gift of flowers from an orphaned child of the American dream! Instead of a yin-yang balance, in this collection of poems we are confronted with a glimpse at the fulcrum of life’s bad fortunes, as one man has experienced them.

            On one side of the fulcrum lies heroism, goodness, opportunity, grace and love. Wine goes down easy, women are virginal and ripe, friends are not yet bitter and secret rivals. The nation lifts up its golden light to a young man’s forebearers. Heroes do not have feet of clay.

            On the other side of the fulcrum? The brick rubble of demolished hope, a landslide of bruises and irredeemable disillusionment. Who among us does not have a teen angel inside us, clinging to the school ring on the railroad track? Who among us? The simple and awful facts of that fateful moment when the freight train struck, when the car went over the cliff, when our parents let us down. When our buddies turned against us or when the object of our innocent affection proved false.

            Who among us, playing and replaying that scene in our heads? That moment just before that fateful moment, when everything was right and glorious in the world. The unsuspecting moment just before the wrecking ball struck?

            And the way the world was to us, after the fall? Whether we are one of those who have suffered, or one of those capable of empathy for those that have, we are confronted in these poems, as in the breadth of writings by Fred Byrnes, with a perplexed fellow, his big hands in his small pockets, undramatically broken, asking us to listen for just a moment to his story.

            In doing so, Fred Byrnes offers us no Jude the Obscure, no Bukowski wannabe. More Rocky Marciano than Charley Chaplin, this is the voice of the bruised, bloodied prizefighter—beaten by the game; hobbled by war, injustice and bad knees. The voice of a man puzzling through the women gone bad, the fake diamonds, the lost heroes, the false tips, and the shallow lovers, superficial friends and irrevocably truncated dreams which haunt him.

            In a sense, by accepting the challenge of reading Fred Byrnes’ poems, we are offered a man who is at a loss to explain what has happened, yet is compelled to try. Even after all these years, like a traffic victim poking through the wreckage in search of his lost car keys. And we are compelled to listen.

            Who reads this book is witness to the plain tragedy of a life—as experienced by an ordinary man, with an extraordinary gift for retelling it. Fortunately for the reader, this is the voice of a man who is articulate enough to command our attention, and who possesses sufficient humility to enjoin us to be witness to his life’s traumas without our pulling away from that enjoinment.

            The gift of plain speech still means something in America . And Freddy Byrnes possesses that gift in aces. Like a quake victim interviewed before dawn. Like a Quaker recounting his plain encounter with truth. Like a punched-out prizefighter trying to explain himself at the bar. This is a thing called dignity in defeat. A thing called submission through art. It is a thing called great reading. Read this book at your own  risk. But read it.

                        George Wallace

                        Suffolk County's first Poet Laureate