After Beethoven - Alison Brackenbury

From Lenin Park, Hanoi, to the Humber, from wars near or remote in space, near or remote in time, these poems come with their news of aftermath, and of the worlds which survive and recrudesce after the sky has fallen. It is not only the large wars but smaller conflicts which define and leave their traces. The poems in After Beethoven are touched by death, but still more stubbornly by life. The poems are order in a kind of progression from shared to private history and then out again; from foreign and exotic to familiar, domestic landscapes and then out again to the world, the voice nurtured and informed by the specifics of place. After Beethoven concludes with the long poem, 'A Short Story', extending the compelling narrative line that has run through Brackenbury's work from her very first book.