About The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology, edited by Helen Handley Houghton and Maureen McCarthy Draper, with a foreward by J. D. McClatchy (Persea Books, 2007)
Poetry and music share countless virtues, affecting us in many of the same ways. We respond to their lyricism, move to their rhythms, and anticipate their refrains. In antiquity, the two forms were one and the same, performed together as inseparable aspects of a single piece.
The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology celebrates this timeless connection with more than 150 extraordinary poems written with music as their muse. Through them, we experience the power of music to enthrall, evoke, and inspire, whether in opera houses, on road trips, or in the unexpected interior worlds to which music escorts us. The book’s nine sections––Listening to Music; Songs and Singing; The Piano and Piano Lessons; Horns, Woodwinds, & Strings; Composers; Music in Nature; Opera; Jazz and Blues; and Performances––include an exceptional array of poets: the most eminent versifiers from today and centuries past, as well as an exciting selection of lesser-known discoveries and rediscoveries.
Contributors
Contributors to The Music Lover’s Poetry Anthology include Fleur Adcock, W. H. Auden, Charles Baudelaire, Jill Bialosky, Robert Bly, Louise Bogan, Eavan Boland, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Hayden Carruth, Nicholas Christopher, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Doty, Jane Flanders, Robert Frost, Louise Gluck, Donald Justice, Mary Stewart Hammond, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, David Huddle, Ted Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Galway Kinnell, Susan Kinsolving, Kenneth Koch, Richard Howard, Louise Labe, David Lehman, Philip Levine, Federico Garcia Lorca, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, William Matthews, J. D. McClatchy, Phyllis McGinley, Sandra McPherson, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Lisel Mueller, Howard Nemerov, Pablo Neruda, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, Frank O’Hara, Linda Pastan, Robert Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Muriel Rukeyser, Rumi, Sappho, May Sarton, Grace Schulman, William Jay Smith, John Updike, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Susan Wheeler, James Wright, Kevin Young, Adam Zagajewski, Jan Zwicky, and many others.