The Music Laid Her Songs in Language

by Michael Haslam

Michael Haslam sees his job as brewing strong lyric from the mash of his ordinary life: working the mills, the dole, walking the hills as he goes, composing a liberal philosophy of the tea-break.

Keenly aware of historical contexts, he muses on the future as the fox in Aesop's fable of the Grapes without a drop of resentment. He draws on the record of eight hundred years of the English canon, and gently blows it like smoke over the carboniferous Pennines. This poem sequence, though born out of tradition, insists on thrusting the reader inescapably forward, positively re-affirming the powers of nature, language, mirth and music.

Haslam... is truly excellent: I haven't read anything that sounds as beautiful as this for years. Worth buying for the first poem alone.

Robert Potts, The Guardian

This book... is a celebration of just being alive.

Herbert Lomas, Ambit 167

I haven't read anything that sounds as beautiful as this for years...

Robert Potts, The Guardian (on The Music Laid Her Songs in Language)

Paperback
48 pages
ISBN 1 900072 68 8
Published January 2001

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