Nuncle Music
"You must not take me at my word, / you must take me at my lack of word, / you must take me at my music". In "Nuncle Music", a sequence of monologues "spoken" by the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Gareth Reeves presents the psychodrama of an artist forced into the service of tyranny. Though the terror and intrigue of Soviet life haunt the poetry, acerbic wit and mischief are also here: Hamlet farts through a flute, Stalin plays the triangle, and up in space cosmonaut Gagarin sings a song by Shostakovich of "intergalactic platitudes". "A compelling psychodrama about the tangle of self-justification, guilt and defiance that has turned Shostakovich... into a paradigm of the conflict between artistic integrity and political compromise... Shostakovich's inner life was like "an incessantly running motor, an ever-open wound". It is this "running motor" to which Reeves listens so carefully in these poems, matching Shostakovich's expedient avoidance of too clear an equivalence between meaning and expression with language that plays similar equivocal tricks... But Reeves sees, beyond the irony in Shostakovich's soul, a man haunted by his past and its effect on his art: "Years ago I listened to the noise of time. / It took revenge. Now I want /noise out of time. The rest is silence".
About the Author
Gareth Reeves studied at the University of Oxford and at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship. Until recently he was Reader in English at Durham University, where he ran an MA creative writing course in poetry. Carcanet Press have published four collections of his poetry, "Real Stories" (1984), "Listening In" (1993), "To Hell with Paradise: New and Selected Poems" (2012), and "Nuncle Music" (2013), a sequence of monologues in the voice of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. He is also the author of two books on T.S. Eliot, the co-author of a book on poetry of the 1930s, and many essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, American and Irish poetry.
Reviews
"Noise out of time" – Andrew McCulloch, TLS
"It isn't easy for a poet to keep faith with Shostakovich, for whom words solved nothing, whose resort was music and, beyond that, self-defeatingly and only in imagination, silence. Reeves does just that" – Gillian Allnutt
