Music, Late and Soon

Robyn Sarah

Image | BOOK COVER: Music, Late and Soon by Robyn Sarah

(Biblioasis)

After thirty-five years as an "on-again, off-again, uncoached closet pianist," poet and writer Robyn Sarah picked up the phone one day and called her old piano teacher, whom she had last seen in her early twenties. Music, Late and Soon is the story of her return to studying piano with the mentor of her youth. In tandem, she reflects on a previously unexamined musical past: a decade spent at Quebec's Conservatoire de Musique, studying clarinet—ostensibly headed for a career as an orchestral musician, but already a writer at heart. A meditation on creative process in both music and literary art, this two-tiered musical autobiography interweaves past and present as it tracks the author's long-ago defection from a musical career path and her late re-embrace of serious practice. At its core is a portrait of an extraordinary piano teacher and of a relationship remembered and renewed. (From Biblioasis)
Robyn Sarah is the author of 11 collections of poems, two books of short stories and a book of essays on poetry. My Shoes Are Killing Me won the 2015 Governor General's Award for poetry. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies. She lives in Montreal.

Interviews with Robyn Sarah