Thanks to Anne Elvey and Plumwood Mountain for publishing my review of Martin Langford’s new collection of poetry and prose, Eardrum: poems and prose about music (Puncher and Wattman, 2019). A topic that’s very close to my heart!
Here’s a poem of mine which also works to find the shared language of music and poetry:
Polyphony
This is the nature of things this dense fabric
of sound
these threads of what thrums true
in my sternum call it melody
the simultaneity of harmony where threads of pitch or
timbre might intersect surfaces tumbling and
touching each other notes that lean close then
yearn apart suspended shimmering somehow
held together here is
infinity
marshalled for a short time in the generosity
of what is beautiful
cradled in the phrasing of an idea
this pattern a language that strikes
or glides or quivers reverberating
through bodies or wood or silver the hollowed bellows
of its making scribed on air
this is the way the world turns the recurring question
of depth its opaque archaeologies finding
the updraft the prospect of
ocean unbearability
of the falling away
