Music Our Bodies Can't Hold

*Shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Award*

‘What use is music your body can’t hold,
that can’t take you from this world?’

Each of these poems is a portrait of someone with or reputed to have had Marfan Syndrome. Many of the poems emerge out of personal interviews, while others are portraits of public figures: Abraham Lincoln, Akhenaten, Mary Queen of Scots , Edith Sitwell, Niccolo Paganini, John Tavener, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Robert Johnson, among others.