Product Description

"The Sunday Sessions" consists of twenty-six poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980 - reportedly, each on a Sunday, after lunch with John Weeks, a sound engineer and colleague of the poet. The tapes, which contain work from Larkin's first major collection, "The North Ship", as well as poems from his best-known collections, "The Whitsun Weddings" and "High Windows", remained 'lost' for over two decades, lying on a shelf in the garage in which they were recorded. Since their rediscovery they have been the subject of widespread media attention, including a BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour documentary. Their contents are here published in full for the first time. The running time is approx 1 hour/1 disc.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17608 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-22
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

About the Author
Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922 and was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John's College, Oxford. As well as his volumes of poems, which include The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, he wrote two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, and two books of collected journalism: All What Jazz: A Record Library, and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. He worked as a librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. He was the best-loved poet of his generation, and the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and the WHSmith Award.

Customer Reviews

Magnificent
Why hasn't this new release had more coverage? I only found out about it because my miserabilist chum who works in the City received it for his birthday recently. It's a joy. Every Sunday, after the pub (one hopes), Pop Larkin went into the garage and laid down a few tracks on the old reel-to-reel. Skip forward a few decades and the tapes are discovered on the shelf, gathering dust and growing a rind. What a magnificent discovery. They're all here - The Whitsun Weddings, Church Going, Toads, The Old Fools, Vers De Societe - around 45 minutes in total. Larkin reads them with a droll, conversational panache that makes you (well, me anyway) laugh out loud at their mordant wit and charm. He is the Dad. Buy this CD.

You can see how it was
'This is the first time I have read before such a large audience,' Larkin once said on Radio 4. A tiny pause. 'And if I have anything to with it, the last.' He seemed to prefer the smallest audience possible whether it was George Hartley, his tape spools turning slowly as Larkin recited his verse, swallowing both his stammer and annoyance with the noisy recording conditions; or here after Sunday lunch in a converted garage with only his sound engineer friend John Weeks for company.

We too are an audience of one for any poet we read, but the complicity between reader and writer is where Larkin particularly thrives. It's implicit in his reasons for writing ('I suppose the kind of response I am seeking from the reader is, Yes, I know what you mean, life is like that') and explicit as he invites us inside to share his bleak though never entirely hopeless view ('You can see how it was', 'Think of being them', 'We know beyond doubt'). The rewards for going with him are the vivid journeys and consolations he provides.

'The Sunday Sessions' lifts that complicity to another level. Now we're with Larkin as his gently see-sawing delivery sets the scenes for his poems. These are rendered with extraordinary precision. In 'Mr Bleaney', we see 'Flowered curtains, thin and frayed/Fall to within five inches of the sill'. Condensing our waiting-room culture of patience into four brief lines, Larkin shows us, 'There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup/Like an airport lounge, but those who tamely sit/On rows of steel chairs turning the ripped mags/Haven't come far.' His pause in the last line of 'Home is so Sad' ensures we catch the god-awfulness of 'That vase'.

Then he gives the occupants of those settings a voice. Some are comic turns as he does Mr Bleaney's landlady, Warlock-Williams and booms 'here endeth' so we snigger even as 'the echoes snigger briefly'. Others are quizzical, delicate, finely balanced in debate with themselves. In 'An Arundel Tomb', the narrator has it out about the nature of love yet can't quite bring himself to come down on one side or the other, the optimism of the famous last line qualified by the preceding one. For the most part, the mood is benign. Only in 'The Old Fools' does Larkin's voice seem to emerge from the poems, rising as he heads for the final warning of 'We shall find out.' In that moment, it sounds as if he's telling us about his dread of endless extinction.

But don't be put off: the quotable lines and haunting images make this CD a must-have, the typo in the accompanying track-listing notwithstanding. Now all we need to do is persuade Faber to round up the rest of Larkin's readings on cassette and LP and reissue them digitally.

A real thrill!
The poems read here just epitomise Larkin's work. To hear him reading such poems as The Old Fools, Church Going and The Whitsun Weddings is wonderful. A collection of 26 poems that takes you back to the written originals to see if you agree with his interpretation!!

Good quality sound reproduction, very little documentation included. A must for anyone who enjoys his work.