Jessica L. Wilkinson, Suite for Percy Grainger

Suite for Percy Grainger: a biography is an experimental poetic work on the life and times of one of Australia’s most innovative and diversely accomplished musicians and composers, Percy Grainger. Alongside his immense musical output — including original compositions and folk-song arrangements — Grainger was also a keen essayist, a voracious reader, a dedicated letter writer, and an eager archivist, establishing the Grainger Museum as a repository for over 100,000 items including correspondence, clothing, musical manuscripts, instruments and everyday objects (not to forget his infamous whip collection). Of interest to Wilkinson, as a poet with one eye wandering into historical archives, is how one might write a biography sympathetic to Grainger’s personality, lifestyle and philosophies.

“Jessica L. Wilkinson is the patient recorder of the rhythms and riffs of Percy Grainger’s life and the brilliant medium hosting his artistic vision. In its wild, spooling energies, this book is an anatomy of creativity and life writing, celebrating point and counterpoint of the poetics of music and music’s poetry.”

— Felicity Plunkett

 

Jessica L. Wilkinson’s first book of poetry marionette: a biography of miss marion davies was published by Vagabond Press in 2012 and shortlisted for the 2014 Kenneth Slessor Prize. She is the founding editor of RABBIT: a journal for nonfiction poetry. In 2014, Jessica won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and was the recipient of a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne.

 

Cover image © Nicholas Walton-Healey, 2014.

Jessica L. Wilkinson, Suite for Percy Grainger

136pp. 2014. ISBN 978-1-922181-20-6