Jean-Thomas Cullen

On Saint Ronan Street Jean-Thomas Cullen

This romantic coming of age novel - bold and sensual, honest and raw - tells of the passionate love affair between a 23-year-old idealistic, talented poet and a beautiful, neglected young married woman in a New England college town set in 1973. Written by a young soldier in 1976 Cold War West Germany and forgotten for forty years, it glows as fresh today as it was when I composed it in Paris and Heidelberg and other European cities where I traveled in my old orange VW as a single, adventuresome young man. Like many soldiers far from home, I was having the time of my life but didn't know it. I was homesick, and spent many evenings going back to our headquarters in an old Hitler-era Kaserne or barracks to lose myself in writing poetry and fiction. This novel was a nostalgic, melancholy, but passionate retrospection to the New England college town where I grew up. It's fiction - but who knows what tendrils of truth, remembrance, and long ago loves sprang up in the soil of imagination. The story has waited forty years, gathering dust, and is finally in print along with its companion volume. It is bursting into blossom, a fine wine uncorked after decades. The companion volume of poetry is Cymbalist Poems, and the two books have been reunited (twins separated at birth) in the book titled 27duet. The poems compiled by 1976 represent the natural ending of my lyrical phase. I was a professional author and summer interne newspaper reporter at 17, and a published poet by 18. This is New Adult (20s) long before today's marketing category--fresh, artful, and emotionally honest.