Chris Athorne A Book of Songs 15 August 2026. 52 pp. ISBN 978-3-901993-89-3 (= PSPS 43) £11.00 (+ 4.00 p&p), €11.00 (+ 4.00 p&p), US$ 14.00 (+ 8.00 p&p)   "When I accepted one of Chris Athorne's poems for publication in Into Poetry, I noted in a commentary that its tone was both celebratory and melancholic. Seeing a wider selection of Athorne's work in A Book of Songs, published by Poetry Salzburg, I find more celebration than melancholy in his poetry. At its best it achieves a pure music. One senses behind the lyricism a powerful intellect momentarily suspending its analytical rigour so that the poet, and his readers, may 'savour / the sensual moment / of being in time'." David Cameron "There is such beauty in these poems as they evoke music the reader can sense; hours that not only mark time but reveal the intricacies of how we live with loss, pain, unravelling and what it is to be a body; songs that ache with tenderness, love and loss and an epithalamion that pulses with memory to conclude 'In dissonance or harmony, /in discourse or dissent; whatever sounds, /allow it. Music survives.' The language is supple and innovative with constant surprises that soar like the music often referenced, but there are no gimmicks here. Rather we are immersed in a life we can recognise so that we emerge seeing the world differently, resonating deeply with the highs and lows and sharing the 'fear of hope'. An exquisite lyric collection." Jan Fortune "Over four sequences, Athorne's A Book of Songs considers faith and worship in sensuous and exacting poems that conjure old songs of remembrance and forgetting. Here are elegies for composers, daily prayers, and celebrations of marriage, all composed with gentleness and wonder. These are poems as records of the sounds we live our lives by. It is an elegant and moving body of work." John Challis

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Table of Contents

Excerpts from A Book of Songs

William Byrd 1540-1623
Mass for Three Voices

Tight woven in the secret places of the heart,
the left hand unknowing,
your purity of voice, economy of art,
betray in false relation
your longing to be pure in heart.

Each takes his, takes her own miserere
in confessional turn
with a dissonance on Mundi,
a doubt, a drawing back
from mystery, from the mass,
the mess of the world,
the thing we leave behind.
 

Gute Nacht

Now we must grow up.
So fold away the fairy tale
and say good night.
Turn out the light.
Kiss once in darkness
to make the thing better.

Then let me steal away
from your dreams
as you slip
into another world
where I have no foothold,
no purchase nor right.

Close the door
on a room still untouched
of music and of smiles,
a vase of cherry blossom.
 

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