Country Single 'SOMEDAY' and Book 'INSIDE A STRING' Receive 5 Star Reviews

Tom MacLears' country single 'SOMEDAY' and New Book 'INSIDE A STRING' receive 5 star reviews!

click here


Jill Lapin Zell's review  • Jul 04, 2014  •  5 of 5 stars

Inside A String: A collection of poems, essays, lyrics and prose by Tom MacLear As a huge fan of the beats (Kerouac and Ginsberg are among my favorites), I felt very much at home in the pages of Tom MacLear’s book. It was like wrapping myself in a cozy, warm blanket. The reader travels with Tom MacLear from the smoky coffee houses of NYC’s Greenwich Village to the boxcars that inspired Woody Guthrie to Steinbeck’s beloved Cannery Row, each very much a part of those artists who shaped America’s culture. Along the way, we realize that we are “Inside A String” that ties them all together. This “string” wraps around one of the central themes of MacLear’s musings, that of the delicate balance between the spiritual and the scientific in all aspects of our lives. He shows us that “the ultimate destiny of our existence is to comprehend the ‘meaning of ourselves’ “ and since this existence is one “which we have only borrowed/For a very short time”, there is an urgency in his message to us. In his opening remarks, Tom MacLear states that “The works contained within are simply one man’s mirror of life as life unfolded before him.” While that may be true, there is nothing “simple” about Tom’s work. It is complex, moving and undeniably profound. In the first section, “The Village”, MacLear captures the pulse of what was the stomping grounds for the beat poets. It was “A place all its own…Where the eccentricities made sense_where I made sense”. Indeed, reading theses poems, we can see that he “never left”. MacLear evokes the spirit of Bob Dylan, who also realized the “subterranean pulse of a new culture”. In “Cannery Row”, we revisit the nostalgic undertones which resonated with John Steinbeck and his passion for it. Through the camaraderie that he knew was among its inhabitants, we see how the human spirit can overcome superficialities. The poet “live[s] what was/for that will never change here”. This sense of nostalgia is what we hear “calling for the days that remind us of what we had felt then”. “Let me stay here as I come home to the place I had never left” He reminds us that “All that is in our past/Is everything we are today”. Finally, Tom MacLear hopes that each artist creates what he or she does “In the hopes and belief/That some good may come from/What they have stirred inside another”. He can rest assured that he has done so with this collection, and brilliantly.