Issa's Sunday Service, #18

This week's offering from Issa's Sunday Service comes from the album I would take to a desert island if only one is allowed: Van Morrison's It's Too Late To Stop Now. Ok, it's 2 discs, but you'll let me slide, right? Tomorrow is Mr. Morrison's birthday and, as a present, he becomes the first artist to appear on this weekly feature twice (and this will be, by no means, his last appearance). Not much of present, you ask? He has everything else.

As with so many of the performances on It's Too Late To Stop Now, this rendition of Wild Children is far superior to the studio original. The song itself sums up a generation, for better and worse, and, if I can mix my clichés, this would be the song I buried in a time capsule on that desert island for some far future alien culture to discover when they go on vacation.

As a bonus this week (and just to see if anybody is paying attention), I'll give a free 6 issue subscription to Lilliput Review to anyone who knows who is being quoted in the album's title? (Hint: it isn't because Morrison says what would become the title during the end of "Cyprus Avenue." In the BBC review, linked above, they even have Morrison saying it during "Into The Mystic." Fact-checker, please!)


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Here's a poem from issue #25, September 1991, by Michael Estabrook. It was on my short list to read this past weekend at the Six Gallery Press reading. Try reading this one aloud, softening the repeated words (and parts of words) as an echo would.

an echo

The grassy grassy grassy
--plain
reaches out across across the road
--the road
cutting man's lifeline line in two two
trying trying to reclaim for mother
--nature nature
what is by all rights
hers and hers and hers

Michael Estabrook

even wild roses
of a downtrodden land
reach enlightenment

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don