Redemption Will Come as a Song
is a combination of new and selected poetry by Lawrence Grieco, spanning a half century of writing, plus a number of autobiographical sketches in prose, and finally five short, short stories. Therefore, this book has a little of everything, and the good news is that all the styles of poetry and prose presented here have a way of relating to and complementing each other, to make, in the end, a whole statement about the author's life and development as a writer and as a human being. Here you will find romance, baseball, anthropology-sometimes all three at once-and more. His poetry is easy to read, but often has a deeper, underlying meaning, waiting for the perceptive reader to discover it. You will also find a whimsical interplay of words and ideas just for the sheer joy of it. His poetry is subject to three rules: Make people laugh, make people cry, make people want to write poems themselves. The autobiographical sketches in prose jump around the author's seven-plus decades of life, defying chronology, "unstuck in time" much like Kurt Vonnegut's character, Billy Pilgrim, in the novel,
Slaughterhouse-Five
. And the short stories at the end qualify as "flash fiction" and are humorous excursions into storytelling. The combination of poetry, memoirs, and fiction make this an unusual, if not unique, book.