For the Roses - Softcover

Patrick O'Neill's verse with its wonderful “everyman” characters brings so-called common folks to a literary immortality that demands his inclusion in the pantheon of old and new great poets. —Del Reitz

It had to be in the mid-seventies when, just divorced, Joni Mitchell's blues echoed mine so wildly. Except for two cds, someone knowing I was thinking of the project got me, I have just stacks of her lps, their slightly musty, covers frayed a little in a house I'm rarely in. I think of myself still in those rooms, waiting for a lover to drive up. It's like a museum, a freeze frame the way poems and songs, especially Joni's, can be: a nostalgic, sadly gorgeous sliver of what isn't, was, or maybe couldn't be.This past summer, along with an assignment for something that often seemed a chore, came the chance to go back and listen to Joni's music and words again. It was an exquisite thrill. On one of my reading tours of California, someone who knew a young writer had a hero-crush on two people, Joni Mitchell and me, made up an elaborate plan: he would be warned of a surprise.