Review of Accompanied Voices: Poets on Composers, ed John Greening, pub. Boydell Press.

Declaration of interest: I have a poem in this, but it's just the one and it seems a bit OTT not to review a whole anthology on that account.

Poems about pictures are ekphrasis, but according to its definition, this can't be used for poems about music; in fact I don't know that there is a name for them. Nevertheless, they clearly have a lot in common with ekphrastic poems, in that they try to express in one art form the effect produced by another. At least, some do. As the interesting introduction points out, some engage with the music, others with the composer's life, others still with the relevance of the music to the writer's own life (poets do have a tendency to look at the world and make it all about them).

I listened to a lot of classical music when younger, then drifted away from it and haven't really listened to any for decades, which means that the more recent composers who serve as inspiration here, I have neither heard, nor, in some cases, heard of. I don't think this disqualifies me from reviewing the book, because a poem must work as a poem, not merely as a homage, and something should still come through to a non-expert. It does mean that those poems which engage with some aspect of the composer's life are liable to make a more immediate impact on me. "Buxtehude's Daughter" (Alistair Elliot), patiently waiting for one of her organist father's assistants to secure the reversion of his job by marrying her, was an old friend from biographies of Handel; he didn't marry her, but another organist did. This poem, narrated in the lady's voice, is not really about music, but about someone on its fringes who might have become bitter but was actually rather good at making the best of things. Elliot brings her alive by catching a very down-to-earth, unremarkable but engaging voice:

When Handel came, he found me elderly.
He was eighteen and I was twenty-eight -
The sad arithmetic of too soon, too late…
I wonder if he ever thinks of me
At night, in London. He liked my soup that day.
Strange to know someone famous far away.

Since I've a passion for biography and history, it may be inevitable that the narrative and anecdotal poems, which don't really need to be about composers as such, appeal to me most. There is a danger, of course, that such poems become too purely narrative, too "this happened and then that", as, for me, is the case with Mick Imlah's "Scottish Play" (which is more about Kathleen Ferrier than Gluck). But many find the universal in the particular. John Greening's own wry little poem "Field", about a composer who apparently had the ill-luck to invent the nocturne only to be eclipsed in the form by Chopin, is something any artist, in any field, could relate to. With those poems that are less about the composer than about his effect on, or parallel with, the poet's own life, success depends, again, on how far they transcend the personal. Lotte Kramer's "Fugue", with a killer ending I won't spoil by quoting, is "personal" yet also universal, a grim and brilliant reminder that being able to appreciate Great Music does not necessarily make one a better person.

Indeed one danger of this kind of poem, and it happens also in ekphrastic poems, is that of undue reverence toward the subject. I hear it in Ronald Duncan's "Lament for Ben" and occasionally elsewhere. Alistair Elliot and Oliver Reynolds are particularly welcome for their avoidance of it, as is the knockabout humour of Heath-Stubbs's Audenesque ballad on Salieri. And James Reeves's "Knew the Master", alone in the anthology, articulates the way reverence for "the classics", in any art form, can stifle new work by denying it an audience.

It's impossible to do full justice, in a review, to an anthology with 180-odd pages of poems. One observation: quoting numbers in a poem does not often make for memorable lines, even if they do have the letter K in front of them – better to put it in an epigraph, as Anne Stevenson does. Stand-out poems for me included Andrew Motion's "Rhapsody"; I'd never heard of Butterworth but who could resist the idea of a man filmed morris-dancing in 1913, a recording still accessible on YouTube though the man himself died three years later on the Somme?

One very interesting thing Greening notes in his introduction: there were very few poems about composers written before the twentieth century. I would guess it's the same with ekphrastic poems, and would love to know why, suddenly, artists started writing about other artists in this way. It goes further than figuring the poet as composer, too. For Douglas Dunn, the music of Bach "restates the rhythms of a loch" and becomes itself a landscape ("Loch Music"). Charles Tomlinson reinvents Bach as a bee-keeper "topping up the cells/with the honey of C major" ("If Bach had been a Beekeeper"), while Tony Roberts, in "Barkbröd", has his narrator seeing Sibelius through the medium of cheese… Jo Shapcott, in her poem about a Schoenberg orchestration of a Bach piece, pertinently asks "Where does it come from, this passion/for layers?" Where indeed, and why now: why is the present day so obsessed with "seeing" one thing through the medium of another? It's a fascinating question, raised by an unexpectedly eclectic anthology; it may be on one subject but the poems couldn't be more varied.