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Summary: You were only waiting for this moment to arise...
Review: A beautiful book of words.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Book!
Review: Blackbird Singing is a wonderful book. I always like Paul's music. After I read this book, I like his words, too. People
always say John wrote good lyrics and Paul wrote good music.
But I found out Paul could write very good lyrics and poems.
They are just simple and beautiful, such as "Ivan", "Dinner Tickets", "Eleanor Rigby", "Yesterday", and etc. They are just
fantastic words no matter you read or sing them. One thing I only can say is Paul should include more his poems and song lyrics in this book, such as "All My Loving", "Get Back", ......
I recommend everyone likes music or literature should read this book - "Blackbird Singing". What a wonderful book! Thanks Paul!
Rating: 
Summary: Good
Review: For those of you who've read Jim Morrison's poetry and gagged like me (and I'm actually a big Morrison fan), you might expect the same tripe from McCartney. Morrison was a bigger student of poetry, but Paul's the better Poet. Granted, Paul has had more decades to his life to read and write poetry, which cetainly is relevant. But Paul's actually a decent poet. I just read a line of Paul's "The critics don't like this poetry." I haven't read any of the criticism. But I think it's decent poetry. Yes, in a perfect world you'd be buying a volume of a starving young (or old) poet, instead of this one. But, if you're going to blow money on a celebrity vanity project, you could do worse than BLACKBIRD singing.
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Summary: I LOVE YOU SIR JAMES PAUL MCCARARTNEY....LIKE A SON!
Review: GOOD BOOK...........READ IT
Rating: 
Summary: Renaissance & Roll
Review: I must admit I bypassed many of the poems that were lyrics (or lyrics that were poems, depending on your point of view) to find the soul behind Paul McCartney's foray into the poetry realm. I was pleasantly surprised that the poems that were poems (or poems that were poems...) were quite good and ingenius. Of notable import are "Ivan", "Jerk of all Jerks", and the clutch of poems about his wife Linda. The overabundance of lyrics - "Monkberry Moon Delight"? - make it appear as though Macca simply didn't have the material to fill a book (which is consistant, as most fans think a lot of his albums come with plenty of filler). But then if one were to take the lyrics out, it would be a slim volume indeed. Kudos to the designers of the book, who went all out in terms of presentation.
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Summary: Impressive
Review: I must say, I wasn't expecting much, but Paul McCartney actually writes some excellent poetry. Of course the song lyrics are fun. But the poetry really reads like quality contemporary poetry that you might read in the PARIS REVIEW, or THE NEW YORKER. His paintings were so bad in his book of paintings last year, my expectations were low for this foray into poetry. But he did a good job. My hat is off to Sir Paul.
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Summary: A Few Gems
Review: I'm a big McCartney fan, and maybe I expected too much, but this book was a little disappointing to me. I don't need to read lyrics to songs that have been out for many years, and are readily available to anyone who wants them. Plus do we really need the words to "Why don't we do it in the road?". This would have been a much better book if they were all new unpublished poems. The remaining poems are very short. A lot of them are only half a page long. The longest one is probably the best one in the book, "Standing Stone". But that said, there are some real gems in here, "Ivan", "Jerk of All Jerks", "Little Willow", "Her Spirit", "She Is", "Nova". I can't help thinking, as I'm sure many others do too, that some of these would make really great songs!
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Summary: Maybe I'm Amazed
Review: It really doesn't get much better than this. Whether you're a Beatles (or a Paul) fan or not, you can appreciate the simply beautiful perspective on humanity as offered in this collection. As we have come to expect from McCartney, the lyrical simplicity of his work remains poignant and ever-optimistic.
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Summary: With or without the music, real poetry
Review: My take on this book of poems is simple: he's been writing poetry since Yesterday ("Oh, yesterday came suddenly"), so it is not at all surprising that someone should have drawn his attention to this fact, and convinced him to release his first collection of poems. Many of his song lyrics are full of poetry, and on the occasion of the death of his friend Ivan Vaughn (who took him to the church fete at Woolton in 1957 where he met John Lennon) he found himself writing a poem with no thought of attaching a melody. More poems followed, as well as more lyrics. Poetry does not occur in large dollops usually, but in a line, a phrase, a couplet, sometimes a whole sonnet. McCartney's song lyrics are full of lines, phrases, couplets, and whole songs which are real poetry: compressed, fresh language that changes our perceptions, catches our hearts, imbeds itself in our brains before we know what's happened, just as his melodies do. His poetry has the same qualities that his lyrics do: an irrepressible sense of play and of wonderment; an enormous warmth that never gets sloppy, wit, curiosity, and great economy of means. He covers a wide range of experience in this volume: from the depths of grief to the pleasures of being married to your best friend to little jokes about Tchaikovsky. He will alternately move you, amuse you, and make you think, as he always has.
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Summary: Blackbird singing (UK) black birds cawing (US)
Review: Ornithology lessonI limit myself to the title - "Black Bird Singing". CBS's Charley Rose, interviewing McCartney, was puzzled by the title (as he usually is, by facts). This may put off north Americans and turn on Irish and Brits. The editor should have known this, McCartney's American readers won't have the foggiest that in Britain and Ireland a "blackbird", ousel in dialect, is no crow, nor raven, no starling nor grackle, but Turdus merula [no snickering; sniggering in UK], European cousin of the North American rusty-bellied thrush (Turdus migratorius), which Yanks call the "robin". The "four and twenty 'blackbirds' baked in a pie" of the rhyme, were of the species merula. Like North America's harbinger of spring, the "black bird" that McCartney is singing about sings sweetly in the springtime and early summer. For North Americans the feel of the word can best be reached by re-titling the book "Robins Singing". But the Brits would then misunderstand, since the bird they call the "Robin" is a bird of another feather, and not seen - or heard - in America, Erithacus rubecula.
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