Cello, Seán Street’s eighth collection, is a series of poetry sequences in memory of his friend, the composer Jonathan Harvey, who died in December 2012. Beginning with the stone circles and barrows of Avebury and ending with a sequence exploring the estuaries of the Thames and the Mersey, the poems explore landscapes that strike chords of memory, elegy and possibility. Together the poems travel from the pain of dissolution towards redemption and celebration, and a world ‘anointed with colour’.
“Cello is, by some way, Seán Street’s most ambitious collection, and in a number of poems, his most experimental. Experiment here is the result of pressure – to respond to the death of loved ones, and to push thought to the edge of the sayable.” – Jeremy Hooker
Seán Street is a writer, broadcaster and Emeritus Professor of Radio at Bournemouth University. Cello includes poems that featured in two collaborations with the composer Cecilia McDowall – Theatre of Tango and Seventy Degrees Below Zero – both now available on CD/DVD. Seán’s previous collections include Radio and Other Poems and Time Between Tides: New and Selected Poems 1981-2009, both published by Rockingham Press. He lives in Christchurch and Liverpool.