Please join us to celebrate the launch of A History of Western Music: Poems by August Kleinzahler. The reading will be hosted by John McAuliffe. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing.

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 Kleinzahler’s 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 Béla Bartók. Kleinzahler’s 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 them – the way the soundtrack of one’s life becomes defined by the scenes it scores, and vice versa.

From John Coltrane to Annie Lennox, 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 one’s life.

About the speakers:

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 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 a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Francisco.

John McAuliffe grew up in County Kerry, Ireland. The Gallery Press has published his five poetry collections, including A Better Life (2002) which was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.