Reviewing Beckett’s book, Song to the Siren, in Music Magazine, Ugly Things #68, Barry Alfonso says

“If you're familiar with a single Beckett lyric, it is probably “Song to the Siren,” the eerie invocation of eros and death that helped bring Buckley his measure of posthumous fame. Beckett's new anthology of poetry and lyrics takes its title from this song but goes far beyond it in terms of form and content.

Gathering more than a half-century’s worth of his work, Song to the Siren veers from mythic invocations of the American past to lusty backroom reveries and playful vignettes with a footloose bohemian edge.  There’s an implied music to these pieces even when they aren’t taken from existing songs.  Beckett always seems to be whistling a tune behind his words, even when he’s facing the end of a love affair or staring down the Void Itself.

…it is steeped in regional American lingo, infused with literary references and show through with wry humor.  …Larry has a distinctive presence in his writing, coming across like a beatnik Mark Twain who cracks wise, moons after elusive objects of desire and pines for exotic lands that may only exist in his dreams.

He relishes fanciful imagery (“We’re sailing down the Ohio on a watermelon seed”), tosses off heroic pronouncements (“I will bow down to the Holy City, his river in my fist”) and coins aphorisms with the stamp of frontier defiance (“You can’t arrest the wilderness”)… Poems like “Corn Cracker,” “Showboat” and “The Sun is Like a Big Brass Band” display a love for blarney, braggadocio and upstart swagger.  Beckett takes an erotic turn in “Blue Rose” and “We Want a Touchdown,” balanced by more stately declarations of love like “Ceremony” and “Passion.”  Poignant elegies for Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Jeff Buckley are the work of a writer who has seen enough of the rock music world to grasp its delights and tragedies.

There’s an unshaken idealism and spiritual centeredness to his collected works that was never fully revealed in his collaborations with Buckley.  Taken together, the poems in Song to the Siren embody a life fully lived, told from the perspective of a young scuffling outsider and a time-seasoned sage.”

-excerpted from full article