The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology

"Here, in a precedent-setting collection, are the master singers." Carol Muske-Dukes

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, not as prima donna and accompanist, but 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; Performances; Composers; Opera; Jazz and Blues; The Piano and Piano Lessons; Horns, Woodwinds, and Strings; and Music in Nature 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.

While the poems in The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology are themselves musical, they are included because they are direct responses to music and the experiences entered into through it. Some are tributes to performers and composers from Bach to Stravinsky to Coltrane to Callas while others recreate the magic of live performance. Others still are exquisite renderings of the memorable, often intimate moments that music generates or leads us to relive an audience of seals drawn in from the sea in Seamus Heaney's "The Singer's House," or a man making peace with his bourgeois roots via Cole Porter in Tony Hoagland's "You're the Top."

Whatever element of music they address, the poems of The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology form a striking arrangement that is bound to resonate with lovers of poetry and music alike.

Contributors to The Music Lover's Poetry Anthology include Fleur Adock, W. H. Auden, Charles Baudelaire, Robert Bly, Louise Bogan, Eavan Boland, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Hayden Carruth, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Jane Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Steven Dobyns, Mark Doty, Jane Flanders, Robert Frost, Louise Gl ck, Deborah Greger, Donald Justice, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, John Hollander, Ted Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Koch, Richard Howard, Louise Labe, D. H. Lawrence, David Lehman, Philip Levine, Federico Garc a Lorca, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, William Matthews, Phyllis McGinley, Sandra McPherson, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Howard Moss, Lisel Mueller, Howard Nemerov, Pablo Neruda, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, Frank O'Hara, Linda Pastan, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Rumi, Sappho, May Sarton, Grace Schulman, Ann Stanford, John Updike, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Susan Wheeler, James Wright, Kevin Young, Adam Zagajewski, Jan Zwicky, and many others.