Existing Music

Trillium Book Award-winner Nick Thran explores the companionship of wistful music in his fourth collection.

The poems in Existing Music both celebrate and interrogate the idea of the “sad song.” The lyrical narrative mixes autobiographical poems with fantasies about the speaker’s favourite musicians—from the long gaps between one artist’s records, and grief over another’s suicide, to the marvelling at another’s ability to write “beautiful songs about potatoes.” The long poem “The Minim” considers the sad song from the point of view of an amateur musician at practice, using language that riffs upon an existing dictionary of musical terms with an eye towards making “vigorous chambers, frivolous rooms.” Lastly, the collection considers the sad song as a collaboration within communities: whether at the bookstore, within a family or between two poets who write in different languages.

“Whether quick on the pivot or ‘slightly less slow than adagio slow,’ Nick Thran’s subtle, meditative poetry combines the moves of an acute point guard with those of a thoughtful flaneur browsing coffee shops and helping to run bookstores. Each poem in Existing Music works its own charm, finding its own apt ‘marriage between dance and speech,’ at once homegrown and riveting.”