100 years ago in May 1924, just two years after the dawn of BBC broadcasting, radio listeners first heard a cello playing while nightingales sang to it, live from a Surrey garden. The cellist was Beatrice Harrison, and she and her nightingales became internationally renowned, recording every Spring over the next 12 years. This collection marks that moment, exploring the power of radio to create a new and unique community, with evocative illustrations by Jessica Palmer.
The poems also feature in a Radio 3 documentary: The Cello & the Nightingales
“In these taut, transcendent poems, Robert Seatter explores the ‘myth cycle’ of the famous BBC recording of a nightingale singing ‘with’ a cello, delving deeper into nightingale mythology and folklore. Each poem repays careful reading and attention: as the opening poem observes 'You’ve been singing all this time/we just forgot to listen.'”
Catherine Smith
When a lover wilfully disappears, what do you do? This book answers that question by charting the baffling, the hurtful and the quotidian, in a sequence of revelatory and penetrating poems. The inexplicable is not explained away, but it is held boldly up to the light. Accompanied by Jessica Palmer’s sharp black and white images, My Lover as Houdini is a courageous, spellbinding collection, scored through with emotion and honesty.
“A stunning, un-put-downable, heartbreaking account of vanished love, which gives not an inch of formal brilliance to the assault of its feeling.”
Carol Ann Duffy
