Candlelight by Seán Street | Poetry Salzburg Pamphlet Series 42
Poetry Salzburg
"Seán Street excels in capturing the significance of the fleeting moment, when, for instance 'the fir tree scuffles with pigeons'. He has, after a life's work in radio, and a lifelong love of music, a remarkable sensitivity to sound - silence, too - reflected in the subtle echoes of rhyme, of rhythm. Elegies for poets and artists honour their work and, movingly, his relationships with them. In Candlelight Seán Street explores the dark predicaments of mortality, the solace of creativity, and the joy of being alive." — Julian May
"Candlelight is the shadow play at the end of a day you'll never forget, a view through a woodland that opens onto eternity. Here are poems well-made enough to handle: objects cut by hand, smooth as river stones, cast to a skilful tune. Amidst these thirty-one elegies for the good ones lost, in a darkening world, come epiphanies of brightness. From parkland to riverside, Liverpool to Paris, join the candlelit table in conversation with Hart Crane and Yeats, with local legends and future days, in poems that draw you into the heart of lived conversation: 'is not the day yet young?'" — Chris McCabe
"The fragility of life and of the world we've created wind through this highly accomplished, quiet, yet deeply affective pamphlet. Liminal spaces and sound are central to the metaphors and lyric stories, poems hanging 'on space / between things / happening', a candle lit in memory in Sacre-Coeur, its flame, like the deceased, 'escaping [...] the prison of shape', a single musical note held for 12 seconds that segues into eternity. The images ring with truth and are not afraid of nostalgia, the sense of homecoming tinged with melancholy, but not with pessimism. In the end it's Spring and new life that holds sway in this elegantly written pamphlet." — Jan Fortune
Seán Street was born in Portsmouth and now lives in Liverpool. He has worked in radio and audio for more than 50 years and is Emeritus Professor at Bournemouth University, where he was the UK's first Professor of Radio. He has published 14 poetry collections since 1976, most recently Journey into Space (2022) and Running Out of Time (2024, both Shoestring Press). He published the Historical Dictionary of British Radio (2007, 2015). Other prose includes works on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets, as well as studies of sound poetics, the latest of which are The Sound of a Room: Memory and the Auditory Presence of Place (Routledge, 2020) and Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong (Bloomsbury, 2023).
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