Music, Awake Her

In Music, Awake Her, Martha Kapos discovers a way of using sonata form to emphasise and reveal key episodes of feeling, ones returned to in different poems written in various moods over a period of nearly 30 years. She imagines sonata form as a narrative structure – with relations to parents giving rise to the two key themes, the child’s conflicts, modulations and resolutions between the two outlining an emotional trajectory that leads from early life, the exposition, through adulthood, development, to the new poems embodying the recapitulations of old age.

In his Afterword, American musicologist Lawrence Kramer writes that the ‘revisited past is the only past we have.

The question of sonata form is how to find it.’ The interlocking of themes and images here makes this Selected and New Poems a remarkable, and psychologically acute, showcase for Martha Kapos’s work. With an afterword by Lawrence Kramer: Sonata, What Do You Want of Me?