Martha Kapos

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?

These new poems by Martha Kapos represent an act of reclamation or capture: an attempt to retrieve someone whose loss has been experienced through illness and finally death. Taking as an epigraph a line from Richard Wilbur ' - a thing is most itself when likened' Kapos discovers various viewpoints from which to try to see the thing 'being most itself'. Most often the viewpoints are visual ones - making use of the phenomenon of perspective with its effects of hiddenness, distance or diminution. In every case metaphor is the guiding principle in these poems, which address how a figure is brought back to life through a process whose essence is poetic. The Likeness is a sustained elegy, an unfolding study in psychology and visual observation, and an example of the animating power of metaphor to reshape loss into presence.

Following her prize-winning first collection, Martha Kapos again captures an extraordinary range of perceptions and emotion. Her style is highly original, a sort of internal Cubism, conveying a feeling-state by observing it precisely through many sharply nuanced images and from many angles. She creates a very distinctive, unique atmosphere - graver here than in her previous collection. "Supreme Being" is both a huge hymn of praise for 'life', for ordinary experiencing, and at the same time faces very movingly and directly the incomprehensibility of loss - the loss of someone else, deeply known and loved, and the awareness, too, of the coming loss of the poet's own 'experiencing': themes as grave and profound as can be imagined. These are the substance of religious feeling and - without overt religious referencing - "Supreme Being" earns its bold title.