Literary Works

As did Fred Byrnes, I was fortunate enough to consider Dan Murray a friend and a mentor. Dan Murray was one of this island's very best. And though he will be greatly missed, his legacy will live on in all those he touched.
    In this, his latest collection, Byrnes pays homage to Dan Murray with poems that crackle, snap, and jump off the page. His view of life among the elements brings one directly to the streets of one of western Suffolk's largest, busiest, and burliest towns. He knows where the bodies are buried and where the tough times and the good times meet, crashing into each other with the reverberating clash of steel on steel. Byrnes talks of the disenfranchised, the lonely, and the hungry in a crisp language that goes straight to the heart of it all, taking us on a ride through his own personal purgatory, facing each of his demons as they appear before him.
    Long Island has been blessed with many great poets from Whitman to John Hall Wheelock to Dan Murray. But as Dan once said when speaking of Byrnes' poetry, "I'll ride with Byrnes."

These poems, timed by the speech of street-level philosophers and small-towned characters caught in that fading incandescent glare of history, speak voices. Cut with chop-shop blends of pop-culture and myth, Fred Byrnes continues entombing loneliness and longing; his watchful eye and ear caught by untouchable flesh and unreachable ideals worked into shorter and shorter lines. Reading these poems is like waving at a ghost ship, an unsunken craft sailing on, which we will keep in sight long past our going home.