RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)Dylan recreates the feel of about 70 lyrics, in a language where passion and precision coincide. It’s a daredevil attempt, because he keeps reminding himself that the odds are stacked heavily against it – the \'heresy of paraphrase\' when a poem is reduced to a summary, may be compounded when words are detached from a melody ... Analysing music is like dissecting a frog – and the frog\\songs dies of it. But Dylan presses on, undaunted. His readings most often enhance the mystery ... Dylan’s choices can sometimes seem surprisingly schmaltzy ... Still, there is almost always method in his seemingly strange choices, leading to brilliant explanations which cast an implied sidelight on much of his work (though he never says so) ... This book is in its way a disguised form of autobiography, fuelled by a hatred of divorce lawyers and copyright breakers, as well as a love of the road ... superb.
Timothy Brennan
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... impressive and rigorous ... The book has its surprises ... For a man with the surname Brennan, this biographer is remarkably silent on Said’s superb analysis (in Culture and Imperialism) of WB Yeats as a foremost poet of decolonisation—of the ways in which Yeats was not only the Irish Shakespeare but also (as Emer Nolan has wittily put it) its Salman Rushdie ... Timothy Brennan has his teacher’s aphoristic gifts ... He captures the lonely integrity of a man castigated as \'a designer Arab\' by some of those he did most to defend.
