Despite the narrator's dull voice, this book of poems is a nice collection. I had to restart the book a few times because the voice was just...no. ( )

Johnny Cash is a man who needs little introduction. Even in my "only Rock and Roll" youth on the east side of Cleveland, I knew who Johnny Cash was and could instantly recognize his voice on the radio. I didn't know much about the man. He had that Christian front and an outlaw image. Forever Words starts with an introduction that covers nearly one-third of the book. His outlaw image really worked as the man in black and also as a man who never served a day in prison. He read and re-read the The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Bible. Christianity was more than just a front. He also wrote a novel called The Man in White about the struggles of early church leader Paul (Saul of Tarsus).

The poetry is accompanied by photos of handwritten poems. Reading the poetry was easy. The language is plain and simple and covers easily understandable topics. The one problem I had, if it can be considered a problem, was reading the poems as lyrics in a voice that sounded deep and baritone in my mind. It's hard not read the poems in that distinctive voice. It is country music poetry more so than Patti Smith or Jim Morrison is rock poetry.

There is humor in some of the poems such as trying to get his wife to wake up by telling what the president is doing or a call to go dove hunting. She is unresponsive to both so he tells her that Roy Rogers and Dale broke up and the next thing he hears is her running to hear the news. He shows his understanding of history with a poem about Tecumseh and religion with a poem on Job. The poems date from the 1940s through the 1980s and although very similar in style the topics cover a great range. I very good collection with an excellent introduction. ( )

I'm torn. On the one hand, I'm a Johnny Cash superfan, owning more than 70 of his albums. On the other hand, I really don't have much use for poetry. I would have liked some of these as songs, but as written verse, I'm mostly underwhelmed. That being said, there were a few really good pieces, including "Going, Going, Gone," "I Heard on the News," and "Room 1702." So when in doubt, go for the middle of the road: 3 stars. ( )

Forever Words is a wonderful collection of almost lost treasure. Johnny Cash has been an icon in the music industry since the 1950s. This book contains a poems, song lyrics and handwritten letters that the world has yet to see. They are being published for the very first time in “Forever Words.”

Being a Johnny Cash fan myself, I was incredibly overjoyed by the prospect of this book. I read through the entire thing in the span of an hour. That being said, I’ll be thumbing through this book for years to come.

Cash’s thoughts speak volumes about how this man saw the world. While most of his life remains a mystery, there’s something to be said for the art that’s been memorialized between these pages. While I feel like I may know the man in black just a bit better, I’m left wishing for even more.

He will always remain a mystery to me but I thank his family for allowing these writings to be published. May Johnny Cash rest in paradise. Now go get yourself a copy of “Forever Words”.

Thank you to Edelweiss for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )

Johnny Cash has always been a ghostly figure on the periphery of my life. I grew up in a Christian home filled largely with the sounds of Christian music. Except when Dad and I would take a trip down to Grandpa's farm; without any big announcement, Dad would tune the radio to the AM country station (KRVN out of Lexington, NE), and for the next hour and a half, we'd listen to Johnny Cash, George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, etc. So I've always associated country music with "going home"; to this day (and much to my wife's puzzlement), I will turn on country music when I drive home to Nebraska.

But you can't grow up in a place like Nebraska and NOT encounter country music. And, if you've had even the tiniest exposure to country music, you know Johnny Cash. Cash and the music he represents has always intrigued me, especially in how it whipsaws from murderer's laments ("Folsom Prison Blues") to warnings about the Second Coming of Christ ("When the Man Comes Around"). Equal parts religious and bawdy, I think that Rodney Clapp was right to use Johnny Cash as the icon of what he called the "Great American Contradiction." Cash's songs have always struck me as authentically "human"--deeply flawed but somehow still hopeful. Cash's cover of Trent Reznor's "Hurt" is mind-blowing to me: Cash's voice is still strong but quavers, and it lifts the song from being a drug addict's lament to being a stunning reflection on human frailty.

I came across this collection of poems and songs, gathered by his son John Carter Cash, in an airport bookstore after a particularly grueling trip. I guess subconsiously, I needed to "get home" in more ways than one. The poems in here, arranged in no apparent particular order, span the entirety of Cash's life. Some were written in the 1940s; others were written in the late 1990s; many are undated.

Each piece often sounds less like a polished poem and more like a "song in progress" (which is probably the reason these pieces were never published), but you can still hear Cash's "voice" in them, that "outlaw cowboy" perspective that is equally rooted in an unshakable faith in God and in the frailty of sinful humanity. There are poems about love, violence, drugs, the Atonement, the biblical character Job (one of my favorites), and the natural beauty of the place called "home." To me, what unites the collection is the sense of longing...for restored relationships, for freedom from addiction, for a return to a lost and beautiful yesterday. There's something about Cash's lyrics that makes me go, "You know, he's right about that..." There's an edge of beauty even when he's confronting the ugliest truths about who we truly are.

For me, the poem that captures the essence of the book and of Cash's art is one from the 1970s (Vietnam-era) entitled, "The Walking Wounded." It opens:
We're in the church-house kneeling down
We're in the subways underground
We're in the bars and on the streets
We drive a truck, we walk a beat
We're in the mills and factories
We make the steel, we cut the trees,
A thousand-yard stare, eyes of glass
We will see you when you pass
We are the walking wounded

We lost our homes, we lost our dreams
All our goals turned into schemes
We hurt each other and ourselves
We went through long, traumatic spells
We cried out from the deepest pit
But rise back up each time we're hit
We fell from power and from grace
But resurrection's in our face
We are the walking wounded

That second-to-last line just slapped me in the face. The near-defiance of a hope that simply will not die...that's why Cash's music lives on. And that's why, even though my young mind couldn't articulate it, I felt so deeply captivated by Cash's rumbling baritone in those long-ago car trips: I was hearing woven into those words the same deep faith carried by the hymns and choruses we played at home...in a different register, yes...in a minor key, true...but there none the less. ( )