A Listener and Other Poems about Music

These poems are the result of a lifetime of highly active involvement with music on the part of a writer best known for his work in philosophy, literary theory (especially deconstruction), and the history of ideas. In this collection Christopher Norris has chosen a great range of verse forms, among them sonnet, terzanelle, quatrain, terza rima, ottava rima, and pantoum. The poems treat individual composers, Purcell to Shostakovich and Philip Glass, and themes such as the tritone, or ‘devil in music’. Spanning ten years of intensive creativity these poems mark Norris’s sustained attempt to assert a more expansive and challenging conception of poetry’s present-day prospects.