Ghosts & Birthdays

"Ghosts & Birthdays is Red Shuttleworth's invocation and - 'levitation with the dead' - a poet's cultural measure of the human menagerie: heroes, villains, antiheroes, writers, painters, boxers, poets, politicos, cowboy robbers, killers - an incredible range of characters in the large world Red Shuttleworth breathes alive. His poetry is always true to reveal human folly - the absurdities that contain a kind of beauty only when articulated by a true poet with a head and a heart. I'm knocked to the mat with what he discovers - his elegiac voice bringing us the ghosts of those about to be lost in the shadows of the digital disintegrating world: Olson, Dorn, Elvis, Ernest, Gabby, Will, Hank, Lyndon, Sonny, Hunter, and don't leave out Gertrude Stein eating popcorn waving fatty arms, at the movies spilling popcorn, laughing.... And on and on... I've always wanted to cross the poetry borders with William Carlos Williams' quote for the Canadian poet, Irving Layton when W.C.W. said of Layton, When I clapped eyes on his poems... I let out a yell of joy Likewise for me here - and Red Shuttleworth's happy birthday to the whole damn thing " -- Barry McKinnon, author of In the Millennium and The The (Finalist, 1981, Governor General's Award for Poetry)