With most artists obsessed with overnight fame, Edward E. Barturen’s debut collection argues for the small rooms, the long road, and the lives lived offstage.
The old man lives “at the edge of the world,” in a house where the gulls know his name. His friends have gone on to “get on with their lives.” Every day, he stands at the window and stares out over the sea, captain of “hundreds of ships” that exist only in his dreams. His wife watches him “sail away,” silently, with her own private stock of dreams that no one asks her about.
He is fictional, of course, the central figure of “Sailing Away,” one of the more haunting pieces in Dreams, Poems and Other Things.
But like many of the characters in Edward E. Barturen’s new collection, Dreams, Poems and Other Things, he feels less invented than recovered: a possible version of the author, or of any aging musician who has spent a lifetime balancing fantasy and responsibility, applause and quiet.
Barturen’s book is slender, but it holds more than two dozen poems and prose-lyrics that read like dispatches from a single, continuous life, not a linear autobiography but a set of close-up shots: the stage lights, the barstools, the night drives home, the murmured prayers for children and grandchildren.
The author lays out the origin story himself in a brief note at the end. As a child, he grew up in a house “filled with art and music,” and watched, “in awe,” as The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. That one broadcast, he writes, “changed my life forever.” Drums at 12, guitar and bass at 13; a lifetime of composing songs that, more often than not, were heard only by a small roomful of people, or by no one at all but the man who wrote them.
Recently, he says, he began rearranging some of those song lyrics into poems and combining them with new work, finally gathering them into a book. It’s an almost inverted music-industry story: instead of poems aspiring to become songs, here are songs accepting a second life as poems — quieter, more intimate, stripped of melody but not of rhythm.
One of the central figures in this world is a working musician who never quite becomes the star he imagines. In “A Life in A Day,” he’s sitting “in my car on the side of [a] bar,” singing softly to the stars, confessing that he’s “a little insane.” Each night the story’s the same: too late, too tired, too obscure. His grandest ambition is not world domination but to have been someone else — “I wish I could have been Billy Shears,” he admits, name-checking the Beatles’ mythic alter ego and, by extension, his own.
In “For Me,” the same man, or someone very much like him, stands just offstage, listening to the announcer scream his name to the crowd. There’s sweat on his face, a knot in his throat; he walks out to find a few people singing along, mostly to the old hits. When he tries a new song, a girl interrupts, asking for an older one instead. Later, at home, he plays his “old records” for his son, who doesn’t believe the voice on the vinyl is really his father’s. Here is a musician’s version of a very ordinary problem: the past never fully persuades the present.
This is where Barturen is most interesting, not in the familiar romance of “I want to be a star,” but in what happens after that dream collides with time. The hair falls out, the eyes droop, the bookings slow. The marketplace asks for nostalgia; the artist wants to keep evolving. The system, such as it is, prefers the younger man who wrote the hits to the older one who has lived long enough to understand them.
Running parallel to this figure is another presence: the wife who stays when the crowd drifts away.
Barturen dedicates the book to his wife, Tere, “for believing and supporting me in all my crazy adventures,” and in “For Me,” she appears again, sitting in the audience, then in their kitchen, offering the sort of verdict no critic can provide. After the show, he asks the question every performer fears: “How did I do?” Like “a million times before,” she holds his hand and answers him simply: “Sing one just for me.” The line is almost painfully modest. The reward for a lifetime of chasing stages is, in the end, the chance to keep singing for one person who still wants to listen.
But Dreams, Poems, and Other Things is not just a backstage memoir. It’s also a long look at how a life’s worth of private feeling interacts with institutions that barely register it: the family album, the culture of fandom, even the way we talk about “time” and “success.” In “My Children’s Children,” the speaker imagines himself as he fears his grandchildren will one day know him — or barely know him at all: “someone from long ago / in a frame in black and white.” As a younger man, he recalls, he watched “faceless shadows” rushing past, never stopping to smile or wave. Now he worries that he has become one of those shadows.
If contemporary culture rewards constant visibility, the daily post, the stream, the algorithmic bump, Barturen is writing from the other side of the glass, where most people live. His poems are full of thresholds and veils: the “other side of the glass” in “The Lunacy of Today,” the mirror with the child “hiding behind these eyes” in “Another Day,” the “crimson cloud” from which an angel descends in “Here in My Dreams.” Again and again, he asks a quietly radical question: What happens to all the feelings that never trend?
The answer, in this book at least, is that they persist as songs, then as poems, and finally as a kind of family archive. The same man who once wanted to be Billy Shears now worries about “all the little ones,” urging us in “So” to “love and protect” them, to “lead them to the Sun.” In “Thoughts About Life,” he reminds the reader that “we were all created equal / the mud was all the same,” insisting on a stubborn, almost old-fashioned belief in common dignity. This is not the language of institutions; it is the language people reach for when institutions fail them.
The collection’s title is accurate: these are indeed dreams, and poems, and “other things” — fragments that don’t always resolve into a single mood. Some pieces read like straightforward love songs; in “For Your Sweet Love” and “I Sing Out to You,” devotion is uncomplicated, almost hypnotic. Others are more jagged. “You Were Born to Break My Heart” lives up to its title, while “She Said” documents the aftermath of a love that has curdled into estrangement and regret. The voice here is less sermon than testimony: the speaker doesn’t tell you what to think; he tells you what it felt like.
It is not always clear where Edward Barturen ends, and his narrators begin, and that ambiguity is part of the book’s appeal. Are the “nomad in a barren desert,” the bar singer, the old man in the seaside house, all versions of the same person? Or are they masks, borrowed long enough to say something the writer could not say plainly as himself? Late in the collection, in “Who I Am,” he describes taking off a wig and ripping off a mask, only to find that his face “is the same.” “You be you,” he writes, “I’ll be me. / Together so different, / as we are.” It is a small, stubborn manifesto in a culture that rewards performance.
The book closes its circle not with definitive answers but with recurring images: the Moon, the sea, the children, the stage lights dimming. In “Time,” love is “frozen,” yet time “creeps by silently / like the light of a setting sun.” In “Say Goodnight,” a grown child thanks his mother for turning “storms into butterflies.” And in “I Sail On,” perhaps the most openly reflective piece, the speaker acknowledges that his yesterdays were his lessons, his tomorrows their result. The voyage of a lifetime, he writes, is “no more than the blink of an eye.”
Somewhere between the bar at closing time and the house “at the edge of the world,” between Ed Sullivan and the streaming era, Edward E. Barturen has been quietly writing this material, singing it, living it, revising it, long enough to know that most voyages do not end in fireworks. They end in smaller rooms: a wife asking for one more song, a grandchild one day pulling a slim book off a shelf, wondering who the man in the black-and-white photograph really was.
And if that child reads closely, they may find him, not in the author bio, but in the old captain who never left shore, in the boy who watched The Beatles and picked up the drums, in the voice that keeps repeating, with a stubborn, almost defiant tenderness: I sail on.
To spend more time in Barturen’s world of stages, shorelines, and second chances, pick up a copy of Dreams, Poems, and Other Things, now available on Amazon.
