Lyrics 1962-1985 (Paladin Books) - Softcover

LYRICS 1962-1985

Bob Dylan's lyrics have been championed by poets Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure, compared favourably to Shakespeare by Professor Christopher Ricks, dismissed by the guardians of 'folk music', chanted at the barricades of civil rights struggles and youth revolts – and rejected in their turn by the generation that followed.

What remains – and continues – is a solid body of work that reflects as well as any cultural document the preoccupations of its generation over a twenty-year period, but offers also an intense and eccentric lyric poetry of sharp images, tuned aphorisms and the rhythmic flexibility of the best American verse.

"Its right to pride of place on the rock culture's short shelf of indispensable writings will be unchallenged. Dylan is the most talented single songwriter of modern times"
CLIVE JAMES, 'The Guardian'

"Variously extraordinary and insinuatingly true songs"
CHRISTOPHER RICKS

"As a lyric poet of intensity, and as a human being of political and humanistic feeling, Dylan stands proud with the revolutionary romantics of the early nineteenth century"
RICHARD GOTI, 'The Guardian'

"The happiest aspect of this book is that it is not the end. There is still more to come from the ever-churning cement-mixer that is Dylan's creative mind"
DAILY TELEGRAPH

Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941. He grew up in nearby Hibbing, a depressed mining town, and briefly attended the University of Minnesota before moving to New York, where he began a career as a songwriter and performer that has lasted more than 25 years. He is also the author of the experimental novel Tarantula, and director/writer of the films Renaldo and Clara and Eat the Document.