Robert Sheppard: Poems in YESTERDAY'S MUSIC TODAY co-edited by Rupert Loydell & Mike Ferguson OUT

This poetry anthology [says its blurb] came out of the editors' shared enthusiasm for and addiction to music, along with a certain middle-aged nostalgia which emerged as the result of failing to be moved by so much of the music they have greedily devoured over the last few years, and thankfully being intensely moved by some. Music can excite, delight, goad, amuse or bore the listener - it also have the capacity to lodge itself in your brain and be heard in the imagination at the strangest times.

This book is about that, about spiralling back into memories, about yesterday's music today: music that has lodged itself in these poets' hearts and souls, and which never fails to move them when recalled or listened to anew.

Contibutors: Rosella Angwin, Sue Birchenough, Elizabeth Burns, M.C. Caseley, Mike Ferguson, david Hart, Paul Hawkins, Sarah James, Norman Jope Jimmy Juniper, David Kennedy, John Lees, Rupert M Loydell, Stephen C. Middleton, Ester Muchawsky-Schnapper, Sheila E. Murphy, Mario Petrucci, Jay Ramsay, Angela Topping, Robert Sheppard.

Review one, in International Times, by David Erdos, says:

Robert Sheppard’s extraordinary ‘Angel at the Junk Box’ is a small modernist masterpiece dedicated to the memory of Frank Sinatra in which ‘every blip is a dizzy how.’ There are not many books or indeed poems that ask you to ‘Mute up your factitious sensation..Until the last syllable cymbals out..’ but you will find them here in both Sheppard and Juniper’s numerous pieces, along with Sue Birchenough’s ‘Aspects of One’ (‘Under my Skin you sing’), through to Sheila E. Murphy’s ‘Flute’ which details how the flute ‘eludes the calculus of impromptu masculinity..pierces the thin wall of breath and cloud..and honours learned signals still in season.’

Read it here. Read the second, by  Charlie Baylis, in Stride, here.There's another, in Stride, by Dean Meadowcroft. Here. (He notices the Sinatra too.)

The book is now available from the publisher, Knives, Forks and Spoons here.

They also published my recent autrebiographies (lots of music in that too), Words Out of Time (see here), AND the recent Festschrift on me, An Educated Desire.

See here for one of my contributions, a poem about Stan Tracey playing Thelonius Monk, which incidentally was a recovered poem (abandoned in the 1980s) included in my new selected poems, History or Sleep. See here for that one.'Angel in the Junk Box' was published in the o/p Tin Pan Arcadia but is also part of the still-available Twentieth Century Blues here. It also appeared in an anthology of poems, all of which were about Frank Sinatra: Sinatra ... but buddy I'm a kind of poem, edited by Gilbert L. Gigliotti, Washington DC: Entasis Press, 2008.