LRB 45s

Why is the London Review of Books putting out records? We liked the idea of marking the paper’s 45th anniversary with a series of 45 rpm vinyl singles, and drawing on our rich archive of poems made sense (LPs of readings by Dylan Thomas or Stevie Smith used to sell by the bucketload). But which poems? There are thousands of contenders. A seven-inch record has space for about eleven minutes of spoken word, which is more than you get with music: the bass requires deeper and therefore wider grooves. Happily, this equates to a long-ish poem – the kind that takes up a whole page or even a double-page spread in the LRB – being read in full.

Ask an LRB subscriber to name a poem they remember reading first in the paper and chances are they will recall one of these big two-pagers, whether Tony Harrison’s ‘v.’ from the early years or Denise Riley’s ‘A Part Song’ or something by Anne Carson from more recent times (all of these will feature later in the series). We drew up a list of ten, to be released across twelve records; ‘v.’ is so long it requires three discs.

Volume 1, released today, contains ‘Byron at Sixty-Five’, a typically inventive and witty dramatic monologue by Edwin Morgan, Scotland’s first Makar of modern times; ‘Requiem for Mohammad al-Dura’, an elegy by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, a rare instance of a translated poem appearing in our pages (the translation is by Tania Tamari Nasir and Christopher Millis); and ‘To 2040’, the title poem from Jorie Graham’s latest collection (‘What was it, u must remember, what was yr message, what were u meant to/pass on?’).

We didn’t simply record the actors in a studio. Dominic West read Edwin Morgan’s brilliant pastiche of Byron’s ottava rima next to the fireplace at 50 Albemarle Street, once the offices of the publisher John Murray, into which the only copy of Byron’s memoirs was thrust after his death by friends eager to preserve what was left of his reputation; you can hear the sounds of the Piccadilly street outside drifting in through the window. Khalid Abdalla read Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Requiem’ in English and Arabic on the top floor of Palestine House, a new ‘cultural embassy’ a short walk from the LRB’s offices in central London. Adjoa Andoh read Jorie Graham’s dystopian vision of the aftermath of ecocide at the Grant Museum of Zoology in Bloomsbury, surrounded by the relics of species and biodiversity loss; listen out for the faint hum of the strip lighting and display cabinets.

Dominic West at 50 Albemarle Street reading ‘Byron at Sixty-Five’ by Edwin Morgan

Khalid Abdalla at Palestine House reading ‘Requiem for Mohammad al-Dura’ by Mahmoud Darwish

Adjoa Andoh at the Grant Museum of Zoology reading ‘To 2040’ by Jorie Graham (photographs by Andrew Telling)

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Volume 1 of the LRB 45s series – a handmade box-set containing three seven-inch singles and an accompanying forty-page photographic booklet in a numbered, limited edition of 360 – is available exclusively from the LRB Store and the London Review Bookshop.