Poetry Thursday - a sonic journey

From today, till 16 July, you can download a piece by Blake Morrison (poet) and Gavin Bryars (composer) commissioned for the Yorkshire Festival. Or listen here via soundcloud.

It's a series of pieces meant to be listened to on the stopping train journey from Goole (Bryars' birthplace: "If water is the wellspring of music, where better to be born than Goole" wrote Morrison) to Hull ... or vice versa ... or elsewhere, wherever you are.

Read about it here; it's a route not without interest:

"While researching the project, Morrison got off at Hessle and wandered down to the foreshore, where he found cellophane wrapped bouquets laid on benches and tied to trees. Each bunch of flowers, Morrison relates, “naming a few of the hundreds who’ve fallen / – Beth, Lee, Jane, Catherine, Yvonne – / and nowhere as lonely as this place / they climbed to, high in the rigging, / above the mudflats and wind-scuffed tides, / where gulls cry and mist softens the welding”.

"The words are accompanied by the viola, cello and bass of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble, with an electric guitar mournfully wailing like a train whistle as we roll beneath grey skies through a captivatingly lugubrious landscape of low-lying sheep fields and windfarms, as damp and flat as Graham Swift’s Waterland, as saturnine as WG Sebald’s Suffolk."

Humber Bridge (via)