Fiddler's Farewell

Fiddler's Farewell brings together the poems Leonora Speyer had written by the mid 1920s, and its governing sensibility, evident from the title onward, is that of a trained musician bringing a performer's ear for tempo and phrasing to work on the page rather than on the concert stage. Speyer trained as a concert violinist in Brussels, Paris and Leipzig and performed under major European conductors before turning her creative energy toward poetry after relocating from London to New York, and the collection's short, strongly musical lyric lines carry that background directly into their rhythm and pacing.

The poems move across the familiar lyric territory of love, memory and the natural world, but Speyer treats each of those subjects the way a musician treats a phrase, attentive to where a line should quicken, where it should hold, and where silence between images does more work than another word would. She writes largely in traditional forms, favoring the kind of controlled, singable meter her violin training would have made instinctive, while still admitting a modern psychological shading that keeps the poems from reading as simple period pastiche. The collection sits, as a result, somewhere between the late Romantic emotional intensity Speyer would have absorbed from nineteenth century concert repertoire and the cooler, more self aware attentiveness of her own contemporaries.

Reading Fiddler's Farewell means listening for that musical patterning as much as for the poems' stated subjects, since Speyer's real distinction lies less in any single startling image than in the disciplined, ear trained shaping of ordinary lyric material. It suits a reader drawn to formally controlled, musically attentive verse on love and loss, and to the particular case of a poet who came to writing only after an entire earlier career as a performing musician.