Matthew McDonald: Gran Partita

If Gran Partita is a collection of poetry about music – its forms, its headwinds, its glinting horizons – it is also a vivid evocation of a world scored by heady ambition, alienation, and the fear of failure.

Drawing its title from Mozart’s Serenade No.10, Matthew McDonald’s brilliantly inventive debut takes readers on a surreal and haunting journey that unfolds across seven movements. Along the way we are met by glamorous concert halls and hotel playlists; bad dates and talking lizards; self-help manuals and ghostly choirs; musings on seances, silence, and slabs of beef marinated in the music of the avant-garde.

As the logics of performance and optimisation increasingly infuse every aspect of lived existence, distinctions between art and the everyday appear evermore diffuse. At times wryly sardonic, at others tender and introspective, Gran Partita marks the arrival of a strikingly original new voice in poetry.