One More River To Cross: The Selected Poetry of John Beecher

by John Beecher

Book Overview

The late John Beecher, though descended from the abolitionist Beechers, grew up in Birmingham, where his father was a steel industry executive. Beecher himself was groomed for a similar role, but when he went into the mills as a young man during the Great Depression, he rebelled and began to write powerful, radical, activist poetry. A contemporary of Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, he became a similar chronicler of the massive human displacement of the economic upheaval of the 1930s. During World War II, he served as an officer of the interracial crew of the troop transport Booker T. Washington, and wrote a book about those experiences. In the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted. And in the civil rights era, he turned his attention to the evils of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. Always, he wrote powerful, spare verse which in lesser hands might have been ruined by its outrage. With his artist wife, Barbara, he published several elegant collections of his poetry on his own hand-set letterpress. His books included Report to the Stockholders, To Live and Die in Dixie, In Egypt Land, and a 1974 Macmillan edition of collected poems. All are out of print.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 158838103X
• ISBN13: 9781588381033
• Release Date: April 2003
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Good collection from an unsung, underappreciated writer

It is hard to find much from or about Beecher in print, so this collection certainly fills a void. The Whitman comparisons are legit, and this book provides a solid overview of his work.

Follow This Voice

John Beecher taught that poetry can literally save your life. It was certainly true in his own case. These poems were written by a man who, given the choice of signing a loyalty oath or being true to himself, knew what to do. Steven Ford Brown, who knows Beecher's work better than anyone else, is the perfect editor for this volume. Grab it while you can.

Beecher's is a much needed voice

For anyone who doesn't know about John Beecher, he was THE American social protest poet. (He died in 1980) His poetry is not technically complex, it's far from high art, but that's the point: it's poetry for common people about common people. His voice of protest is so heavily laden with the truth that it's impossible to ignore. In one poem in the book, he describes how standing up for the right thing isn't hard when you accept what the right thing is and don't accept anything less - in a world where money interests rule so many parts of life, Beecher's is a much needed voice.