A History of Western Music: Poems

Description

In a career-spanning selection of poems, August Kleinzahler captures the essence of the West’s greatest music.

In A History of Western Music, August Kleinzahlers rhythmic, wry, kinetic style captures the ineffable power and beauty of great songs and artists, as well as the potency of our response to them. In this collection, music is inextricable from life, from landscape, and from the people we remember through it. The poet inhabits the minds and milieus of musicians; he hears arpeggios in the salon of Princesse Edmonde de Polignac and listens to the vibrations of a hummingbird through Bla Bartk. Kleinzahlers verse not only contains the same sonorous beauty as the compositions he writes of but also the vitality and complexity of the moments we associate with themthe way the soundtrack of ones life becomes defined by the scenes it scores, and vice versa.

From John Coltrane to Annie Lenox, from opera to bebop and all the jingles and melodies in between, A History of Western Music is a portrait of the vast range of meaning and memory that music creates and contains in ones life.

Author Information

August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was awarded the 2004 International Griffin Poetry Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. That same year he received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.