In Memoriam

Jim Carroll, author of The Basketball Diaries. I have a copy sitting here in my to-read stack. And I've never heard his music that I know of. But I've read his poetry, in a collection I reviewed some years ago at Epinions, Fear of Dreaming.

I love them, although they are not easy going. Carroll’s imagery has been called “hallucinatory,” and that seems as good a word as any to describe the associations he sets up. It is worth mentioning that Carroll is also a rock musician, with four albums to his credit, as well as a “best of” album, because there is a hard-edged, eerily beautiful music in these poems that sets off and supports the strong, unnerving images.

It was really a sort of "collected poems" volume. Excellent, the kind of poetry you can really lose yourself in.

And he was only 60.