In a career-spanning selection of poems, August Kleinzahler captures the essence of the West’s greatest music.

In A History of Western Music, August Kleinzahler’s rhythmic, wry, kinetic style captures the ineffable power and beauty of great songs and artists, as well as the potency of our response to them. In this collection, music is inextricable from life, from landscape, and from the people we remember through it. The poet inhabits the minds and milieus of musicians; he hears arpeggios in the salon of Princesse Edmonde de Polignac and listens to the vibrations of a hummingbird through Béla Bartók. Kleinzahler’s verse not only contains the same sonorous beauty as the compositions he writes of but also the vitality and complexity of the moments we associate with them—the way the soundtrack of one’s life becomes defined by the scenes it scores, and vice versa.

From John Coltrane to Annie Lennox, from opera to bebop and all the jingles and melodies in between, A History of Western Music is a portrait of the vast range of meaning and memory that music creates and contains in one’s life.