Reading poetry in the pandemic is waxing, as people turn to verse for solace amidst their grief or for expressions of their own anger at needless suffering and death.

We are not supposed to call the struggle to contain, suppress and/or beat the coronavirus a war yet it is to war poets people often reach out on social media and elsewhere. Walt Whitman visiting hospitals in the American civil war. Our own Sassoon and Owens in the trenches of World War One.

But also to songs for our age of sorrow and, occasionally, humour (however dark and savage) to see us through lockdown. Stewart Conn, Edinburgh’s first makar (2002-05), has written: “The poet’s task, to seek/significant detail/in the face of horror.’ Here below, confined to his New Town home, he writes of Schubert and birdsong in a splendid Scottish spring.

Making Music

for Anna Crowe

Franz Schubert String Quartets [Fitzwilliam String Quartet]

From a review in the TLS I learn

that the political climate of northern

Siberia once led to the deterioration

and destruction of generations of pianos,

their ripped-out wires morphing into

fishing-lines, jewellery-ware and garottes.

 

Precluding any dark train of thought

the post brings a package with a CD

of two Schubert quartets and a card

explaining how, your musician

friends’ public performances cancelled,

you are keen for them to find a hearing.

 

From my open window the ferocity

of their bowing has already

made startled converts of two male

blackbirds, heads cocked, while high

in our cherry tree a transfixed bullfinch

beats his tail in time to the music.

httpss://youtu.be/5NKEHosQf2k

Published with kind permission of Stewart Conn

Featured image: Male bullfinch, © Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0