The Sunday Sessions

By: Philip Larkin

Narrated by: Philip Larkin

The Sunday Sessions consists of twenty-six poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980 - reportedly, each on a Sunday, after lunch with John Weeks, a sound engineer and colleague of the poet. The tapes, which contain work from Larkin's first major collection, The North Ship, as well as poems from his best-known collections, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, remained 'lost' for over two decades, lying on a shelf in the garage in which they were recorded. Since their rediscovery they have been the subject of widespread media attention, including a BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour documentary. Their contents are here published in full for the first time.

©1945 Philip Larkin (P)2009 Faber & Faber

Critic reviews

"[Larkin] is a fine, illuminating reader, springing the surprise of little surges of lyricism amid the colloquial observations of provincial life." (Carole Mansur, Daily Telegraph)

"They are relaxed readings, a self-selected 'retrospective' in which one senses that Larkin has chosen poems of which he is particularly fond. He sounds less self-conscious than in more official recordings, perhaps lubricated by a good lunch, perhaps happy not to have an audience, with all its coughs and chair-scrapes and visual distractions. He includes the singingly Yeatsian Within the dream you said from his first collection The North Ship, published when he was only 23, and before he discovered the dryly sardonic voice of Mr Bleaney and Vers de Societe. But he ends with a return to romance: the magnificent 'An Arundel Tomb' - 'What will survive of us is love'." (The Times)

Misanthropic Genius

Whether you share his world view or not (I do), you have to laud his gift. And his reading. He sounds each phrase, each verse, each poem as if it was occurring to him in the moment.

And lordy, lordy, how he ensures ennui.

A perfect thing

I’ve listened to countless poetry readings. Philip Larkin’s Sunday Sessions is, for me, the most rewarding—infinitely repeatable. Humane, unsentimental and touching.