Hill, Geoffrey

Clavics

£9.99

Dimensions: 216 x 138mm
ISBN: 9781907587115
Pages: 41
Format: Paperback

Clavics

An elegiac sequence, mourning for the musician William Lawes who was killed at the Battle of Chester in 1645. Delicately constructed, each page has a section made up of two stanzas, together forming the shape of a key. Before long, however, the tone makes it clear that nothing is to be taken at face value. Amongst the lines are provocations and incongruities, playful references and about-turns. Clavics is a celebration of seventeenth-century music and poetry, yet is confrontational and sometimes shockingly modern. From one line to the next you may be pulled out of a potently evoked moment of history. You could be thrust up against the wall of sexual politics and strained meaning in contemporary language. After all of this, you could be dropped back onto a battlefield.

Clavics