Keeping Time

by Tim Dooley

Salt Publishing, Cambridge © 2008

 

The following was taken from an on-line "Book Description" of Keeping Time which also included some very positive reviews.

For Friends of the Phonograph it was obviously the cover that was the trigger for adding it to Phonographia's PhonoBooks. I Unfortunately I don't have a copy yet but the reviews are good and there is one poem, "Sunday Morning" that does reference the radio playing Haydn which is reprinted below.

 

Sunday Morning

 

Stevens, MacNeice and The Velvet Underground.

A lightness rising to a cloudless sky.

Too tired for sleep or love we drive together

out of numbness to a different town.

The long ponds where we used to feed the ducks,

the stretch of green that climbs to the cathedral,

the breakfast, the bookshop we trust will

take gravity from us, floating away.

 

But now the radio plays Haydn, a piece

in F sharp minor, contrived we’re told

to solve a problem in the Esterhazy Court,

so in the last movement the players left

singly, snuffing out their candles, leaving

the last couple to hold the stage alone.

 

Poem reprinted from review by Todd Swift in 2008