The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You Paperback – June 1, 2000

I have been waiting to get this book for over 10 years, and it is well worth the wait I endured!I first read Frank Stanford and an exerpt from The Battlefield when I purchased the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Anthology. I was immediately captured by the immense narrative form that I found. I later bought The Light the Dead See and was amazed yet again. Upon finally getting my hands on this book I can say without a doubt that I am in love with the words of Frank Stanford.The new edition is not 542 pages long, but this is a result of the enlarged book format that the publishers chose. However, the poem is a single, 15,000+ line stanza of poetry that can seem most daunting any way you look at it. What got me going is my anticipation. I just dove into the book and didn't look back.Within the narrative, you find Francis, who is an amazing guide through a rural, Southern landscape, filled with adventure and figurative language that at times cause me to catch my breath. Francis narrates from both an observational and personal point of view, and it is up to the reader to catch up with him. At times he is telling you what happened to him, what he heard about someone else, what he was/is dreaming, and what he plans on doing.The text is full of allusions and references to other epic stories. Francis and the events and people who surround him culminate with these allusions into an Epic for the modern reader. At times the writing looks too unorganized to be an epic, but this is not the case. I am convinced that Stanford knew what he was doing every single line and word of the way. This truly is poetry with every line a composition in itself.At every turn of the page there is a new secret, a new wonderful discovery to be found. I urge you to read this book and help to re-discover a lost American poet. I was so impressed, I bought a second copy as a gift and would not hesitate to do so again for the right person.

Frank Stanford was a legit American genius. He left behind some great work, which is both a consolation and a tragic reminder of the brilliance that was cut short too soon.

While it is a very thick read, I feel as though this book should be required reading for anyone studying American literature. Stanford was a lost and dark soul, whose ability to transfer his emotion directly into these words.Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.

this is the greatest poem ever wrote. past, present & future. period. end of story. read it if you give a s*** about art.

a huge baggy concoction; a journey, ostensibly spiritual, undertaken by "Francis" the youthful omnivorous knight-errant hero of a tale as baffling, logistically, as the migratory patterns of the ancient Clovis people, first inhabitants of the Americas.Brilliant lines sprinkled like paprika through pages of pedestrian verbiage; a non-politically correct amalgam of the weird and fabulous, full of non sequiturs, malapropisms, guttural artifacts, in French, Latin, German--pas mal, bon, gud--streetwise and book smart.

I don't really know how to describe this other than to say its very beautiful and full of pregnant phrases, as the surrealists might say. Evokative and quite beautiful with a strange beauty.

Best long poem I've ever read

this book is a must have for anyone studying southern writers. This is a book you will never finish reading. Pick it up, open it, start reading and you are there, in Stanford's south of the 1950's and 60's.