This mini-anthology is one half of our double album of music poems. Musician and poet Kim Moore’s selection beautifully explores what it feels like both to hear and play music.
 
The poems take us from Tennyson’s eerily echoing bugle to Faisal Mohyuddin’s evocation of a father singing a song his own father taught him in the family kitchen. Music transforms us, and playing an instrument can transform the human body too:
 
“At the end of your hands, a troop of gymnasts,
who want to twist and twirl, who want to whirl
and dance, to do some mischief in this world.”
from ‘The Pianist at The Grand’ by Jonathan Edwards
 
The abiding spirit of the selection is the power of music to make its way straight to the heart. As Abeer Ameer writes in her beautiful poem about a reed flute: “all music yearns for home”.
 
Poems by Abeer Ameer, Emily Dickinson, Jonathan Edwards, Carrie Etter, WS Graham, Hannah Lowe, Edna St Vincent Millay, Faisal Mohyuddin, Kim Moore and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
 
Cover illustration by Melissa Lhoirit.