Ballads and Other Poems

These are the voices of a revolution, captured in verse that burns with colonial defiance. George Lansing Raymond's collection draws from the charged atmosphere of 1760s and 1770s America, when colonists moved from grievances to gunshot. The ballads dramatize specific moments of resistance, the resentments curdling over the Stamp Act, the audacious raid on the Gaspee, the ordinary people swept into extraordinary times. Raymond writes with the dramatist's eye for scene and the historian's respect for what actually happened, giving readers both the sweep of revolution and its intimate human cost. But the collection refuses to be only a historical artifact. Interspersed among the revolutionary verses are dramatic pieces centered on Haydn, the Austrian composer whose life becomes a meditation on artistic creation, legacy, and what survives the artist who makes it. These poems ask how beauty persists when empires fall, when causes are won or lost. The result is a collection that functions as two books in one: a stirring account of a nation's violent birth, and a quieter, more lasting question about what we build that outlasts us.