Music's Bride - Softcover

Marius Kociejowski

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0856463183 ISBN 13: 9780856463181

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd., 2004

Synopsis

Music is the motif which underlies the poems in Marius Kociejowski's second book. In Dinu Lipatti plays Chopin's Sonata in B minor, a musical theme illustrates the solitude of a troubled woman who is no man's, only music's bride'; elsewhere, music is the link in the relationship between the dying Chopin and George Sand. Other poems explore tenderness and the origins of violence. Marius Kociejowski is a poet of high intelligence and accomplishment, with a gift for historical empathy and a voice entirely his own.

 

Marius Kociejowski was born in 1949 and lives in London. His Greville Press pamphlet Coast was awarded the Cheltenham Prize in 1991. His first collection was Doctor Honoris Causa (1993).

About this title

About the Author

Marius Kociejowski was born in 1949. He lives in London and works as an antiquarian bookseller. The title poem of his pamphlet Coast was awarded the Cheltenham Prize for Literature in 1991. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East.

 

Reviews

Kociejowski, an antiquarian bookseller living in England, offers us a short and motley collection of poems centering on the theme of music. Like Borges trolling for inspiration among the special collections of libraries, Kociejowski looks for his subjects in obscure texts and forgotten legends. Salvatore Guiliano concerns the adventures of a Sicilian bandit, The Charterhouse at Valldemosa recounts the winter spent by George Sand and Frédéric Chopin on Majorca, and Communiqué for William Hoffer reflects on a Canadian literary lion who was also one of the best poets never to have written a verse. But whereas Borges's bibliolatry was only a springboard into the ether of metaphysics and religion, Kociejowski seems to enjoy the recherché for its own sake. Most of his poems are thus accompanied by long explanatory endnotes, in which the jocose vies with the pedantic. The wildly disparate subjects of these works are nominally gathered under the cloudy trope of music. Chopin figures in two of the long poems, another concerns the songs of a Persian Sufi singer, and A Pavane for Sydney Housego describes an old violinist playing for money in a park. The long poem about Chopin and George Sand in Majorca is essentially a prosy piece of biography culled from letters written by Sand with no organizing themes or extended conceits. Yet in the final section Kociejowski will have the final word on Chopin, pulling this limp rabbit from his inch-deep hat: What music is, his life is: / a prelude that supposes what it is prelude to exists already, / if soundlessly so. The sentence, like the poetry, requires long puzzling and offers brief rewards. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0856463183
• ISBN 13: 9780856463181
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64