"What magic this! Larry Beckett’s enthralling rst contemporary translation of

Merlin’s poems makes live and present—from Brythonic voice, whose tongue

gave rise to Britain—a time before our ken. With surety and pluck, this

poet-translator moves Merlin to the center of the song—wild-man and prophetic

bard, peer to Taliesen—bringing forth the blood, anguish, lust, and fury of this

ancient shapeshifter, so dierent from the genial wizard of popular imagination.

Highly readable, fully imagined, sharp and untamed, Beckett’s brilliant act of

translation conjures Merlin’s voice and his world to perfection."

— Marc Zegans, author of Lyon Street, and The Snow Dead

"An imaginative attempt to recreate a non-existent book. While Beckett's poems

are written in a modern diction and metre, their cadence and syntax manage to

suggest poems written in another language in a distant past. If the real Myrddin

Wyllt had written poems in modern English, they might have read like these."

— Dr. Liam Guilar, author of A Presentment of Englishry and A Man of Heart

"This is an outstanding collection. In twenty-four pointed monologues and

dialogues, Merlin, the war-worn recluse, laments his lost companions and his

own fate. Deftly shaping his fast-moving modern verse with features of traditional

Welsh forms, Larry Beckett revives the dead and foretells their future with

regret, wit, and deance."

— William G. Carpenter, author of Eþandun: Epic Poem

"The sixth-century world of the poet called Merlin of the Wilds is one of sharp

contrasts: savage battles and rivalries are set against natural beauties part

homely and part magical. It’s a world in which the role of the poet is not just to

sing but to prophesy to kings. Larry Beckett’s renderings of Merlin’s world and

words, derived from Georey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, are richly sonic and

songlike, full of refrains, repetends, pulsing four-beat lines, and musical Welsh

names. They make a distant world-picture—and a poet’s enigmatic life—tangible

for us, in laments and foretellings, histories and prayers."

— Maryann Corbett, winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize