As part of the 2015 JAM (John Armitage Memorial) Festival in the Romney Marsh churches, on Saturday 11th July at 4-00 p.m., in the church of St Mary in the Marsh, C.J.Driver (Jonty) will read his long poem, REQUIEM, first published in 1997/8, with Peter Fields, the violinist, playing transposed excerpts from Bach’s Cello Suite No 1, in between the seven sections of the poem.
1. “Before Sunrise” and 7. “Late `Night: Waking” balance each other, so do 2. “Love-song in Twelve Fragments” and 6. “Love-song in Old Age”; so do 3. “I shall keep my mouth as it were with a bridle…(Psalm 39)” and 5. “Three Elegies"; and 4. “Halfway to Heaven” holds the arch in place. The poem moves from early morning to mid-afternoon to late night; from winter to spring to high summer; from time present to time past and back to time present; from despair to rage to acceptance - and the forms balance not only each other but the structure, raining from rhymed quatrains to the pentameter (broken and fragmented) to leisurely syllabics. Yet, for all its technical variety, the voice of the poem is utterly personal: quiet, experienced, sombre, vulnerable.
REQUIEM provided the words for an order of evening service in Westminster Abbey in November 2014, read then by Chris Chivers, with a cellist, Bryan O’Kane, providing the accompaniment. Details of this event, including the text of the poem, can be seen below in a blog entry dated, appropriately, 11 November 2014.
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