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GREAT MASTER/ small boy by Liz Lefroy

£7.50

ISBN 978-1-911048-56-5

30pp, B&W inners

£7.50 (includes p&p)

Pub date 4th June 2021

Category:

Description

This collection of poems is almost as much about Vienna as it is about Beethoven.
By recognising that Beethoven was moulded by the city in which he spent his entire adult life, Liz Lefroy not only manages to avoid the many clichés about Beethoven, but succeeds in creating a truer reflection of him in her poetry.

JOHN SUCHET

 

Perfectly tuned poems which show us that a love of music is always a journey through family, through memory, through geography and towards love.

ANDREW McMILLAN

 

Liz Lefroy’s pamphlet of poetry is innovative, beautifully composed and is as unique as Beethoven himself.

EVERYBODY’S REVIEWING Read full review here

 

Enjoy the journey, the company, and the music.

ORBIS #197

Beethoven, Viennese Whirls and love.

INK,SWEAT & TEARS
Read full review here

 

 

ABOUT LIZ LEFROY

Liz was winner of the 2011 Roy Fisher Pamphlet Prize, highly commended in the 2015 Bridport Prize, winner of the 2016 Café Writers Prize, runner up in the 2017 Wigtown Poetry Competition, and 3rd prize winner in the 2019 Wolverhampton Literary Festival Competition.

Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy to perform in Bridgnorth in 2016 as part of the Shore to Shore series of readings, Liz has also read at venues from Edinburgh to Paris, and hosts the monthly event, Shrewsbury Poetry.

Liz’s poems have been selected for anthologies (The Emergency Poet, Off The Shelf, The Result Is What You See Today, #MeToo: A women’s poetry anthology) and magazines (including Mslexia, PN Review, The Frogmore Papers, Poetry Wales, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Under the Radar, Standpoint). Liz blogs at someonesmumsays.blogspot.co.uk.

More information can be found here: lizlefroy.wix.com/liz-lefroy.

THE FIRST POEM FROM THE PAMPHLET:

VIENNA, 2018

This city’s a miniature of empire – a lavish
half-continent heated up, compressed into stone.
Here are dozens of palaces, domes, gold eagles,
vast cobbled squares centred on monuments
to rearing Emperors and seated Empresses
using the names Holy and Roman without irony.

We’re here for Beethoven, but it’s thirty degrees,
and the Philharmonic’s not playing anything.
Music’s closed for the summer,
or at least limited to men in powdered wigs,
Mozart coats, black-buckled shoes, grubby stockings.
They’re handing out leaflets for Vivaldi.

I’m hot, wonder who’d bother to pay
to hear The Four Seasons when they’re
freely available back home, online, and on any phone.
We opt for Schoenberg – walk to Zaunergasse,
find the museum’s shut for alterations.
In the gift shop, you read the maths of his scores.

We concede, choose a palace at random,
the Belvedere, and, lucky for us, it’s Baroque excessive,
a Hapsburg two-for-the-price-of-one,
summer and winter residences linked by
wide flights of stairs, knot gardens, fountains:
the cool geometry of imperial design.

There are signs to Klimt’s Kiss – we find two,
one a selfie-point copy catering for tourist love.
But we’re mother and son, so turn away, come across
Rodin’s bust of Mahler, discover you share his nose,
the shape of his chin; you square up for a photograph,
match his profile, pose for pose.

 

PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS

Pretending the Weather (2011) Long Face Press
The Gathering (2012) Long Face Press
Mending the Ordinary (2014) Fair Acre Press
I Buy A New Washer (and Other Moderate Acts of Independence) (2020) Mark Time Books

 

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