Lyon Street

by Marc Zegans
Bamboo Dart Press
Copyright 2022
51 pages

Review by Lo Galluccio

In the forward to Lyon Street, Marc Zegan’s luminous new poetry collection, he explains that he
spent his formative years in San Francisco and marks Lyon Street as the touchstone for his
coming of age as an artist. He specifically notes the Lyon Street stairs “surrounded by a
eucalyptus grove lit magically by an old verdigris lamp” where he and his friends hung out
drinking beer and writing songs. With a delightfully detailed and signifying map of locations
included as part of this collection, Zegans pays powerful tribute to this place, this city, in an era
before both Reagan and AIDS, where he witnessed beauty, eccentricity, decadence and grit and
was moved by the memory of its varied characters to write.
As it happens, I’ve been relistening to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and the song “Cyprus
Avenue” with its bittersweet longing and visionary mélange of figures, its sweet cherry wine,
etheric strings, and blissful jazzy atmosphere resonate with Zegans work. Both express hard-won
rapture and hard-scrabble nostalgia for the way a place can transport and identify one’s identity.
Like Morrison, Lyon Street, hearkens after a love both innocent and lost, but possible to
reconjure through an artist’s sensibility in the right light.
This collection contains well-wrought poems that are heart-felt odes to old friends, musicians,
lovers, barmaids, BBQ, blues joints, strippers, drag queens, rival Chinese restaurants and
neighborhoods, along with the simple joy of fishing in the bay and riding the Steep Ravine
Beach surf. It captures an era, like Patti Smith’s late ‘60s and early ‘70s in NYC, when a place
that has yet to completely commercialize and sell out, stimulates and nurtures young artists’
nerves and visions.
Part of Marc’s genius is in the unique style and inspiration of each book he produces. The
excellent Lyon Street is a charming and acute portrait of a magical city the poet remembers like a
timeless song. It’s well worth reading.