LRB 45s: Volume 3

Why is the London Review of Books putting out records? Read more about this project on the LRB blog.

A handmade box-set containing three 7-inch singles and an accompanying 40-page photographic booklet in a numbered, limited edition of just 360. In Volume 3, you’ll find three new recordings of significant longer poems first published in our pages:

Lavinia Greenlaw’s ‘Outside the Work’ (2024), read by Emma D’Arcy, recorded at Trinity Buoy Wharf

Poems from ‘Squarings’ (1989) by Seamus Heaney, read by Stephen Rea, recorded at St Pancras Old Church

Anne Carson’s ‘Wildly Constant’ (2009), read by Gwendoline Christie, recorded at the Freud Museum

Each recording was again made in a loosely connected location, whose particular resonances you can hear in its background textures. We recorded Emma D’Arcy reading Lavinia Greenlaw’s poem about reassembling a perceptual framework after a traumatic event at London’s only lighthouse. Stephen Rea read eleven poems from Seamus Heaney’s ‘Squarings’ sequence at a church long associated with writers, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Thomas Hardy. In ‘Wildly Constant’ Anne Carson quotes Anna Freud, and we recorded Gwendoline Christie reading it in Sigmund Freud’s study in the house in Hampstead where he spent the last year of his life and where Anna lived until her death in 1982.

The concluding fourth volume in the series will be released in time for Christmas.