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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.

A Work of Love's Imagination & Homesick Nostalgia. I was always an author and poet, even while stationed far from 'the World' in 1970s West Germany. This is my long-lost novel, finally published after gathering dust for 40 years. It sparkles with life, melancholy, and passion as if it had been written today.

When I was 27 and a soldier in West Germany 1975-1980, I did a great many things. I worked hard at my day job in the U.S. Army barracks where I was stationed. I traveled all over Europe in my orange VW bus (Paris, Brussels, Luxembourg, Heidelberg, etc). And I was privately an author.

Many nights, when I was not downtown in Kaiserslautern bar hopping with my U.S. buddies or German friends, I would go back to the office near my barracks. I would write in solitude to gentle strains of Mozart, while ghosts and moths fluttered around me. I wrote several novels during those years, a lot of poetry, and short stories. I'd been a published poet and a professional writer-editor-news reporter by age 18, so this was a serious passion and an ambition rather than a trivial hobby. I had an English degree (B.A., University of Connecticut), spoke several languages, had been born in Europe and spent my childhood there. I was born a U.S. citizen, and came home to New Haven, Connecticut at around 10 when my father retired from the U.S. Army. My mother was a Luxembourg citizen.

My "27." Now available: the double-header. I had another neglected manuscript from age 27, my poetry collection. This project is still a work in progress—capturing a long-lost moment in time and space, long ago and far away.

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