Roger Coull & Philip Gallaway, violins - Gustav Clarkson, viola - Nicholas Roberts, cello
Coull Quartet
Quartet-in-Residence, University of Warwick

David Hart

‘Haydn comes to lunch and sends a letter home’

from Running Out, published by Five Seasons Press (2006)

David Hart wrote this poem during and after a performance we gave in the University’s Philosophy Department in 2002.  David wrote:  “It puzzled me  - it still does puzzle me - how to catch something of the flow of music in words, and I dare say it’s a forlorn notion, while intriguing.”
David Hart has lived in Birmingham most his life, born Aberystwyth, Wales, where he sang in a good church choir, St Michael's. Sometime Anglican curate in Highgate, London, then Birmingham University chaplain; subsequently Birmingham Post drama critic, then arts administrator (West Midlands Arts/Arts Council), now lives as a poet, with recent part-time teaching posts at Warwick and Birmingham Universities. Poetry residencies include South Birmingham Mental Health, Heartlands Hospital, poetry festivals and Worcester Cathedral. Commissions include Royal Mail, Symphony Hall, Birmingham Symphony Chorus, Sean Henry (sculptor), Ikon Gallery (B'ham), B'ham Museum & Art Gallery (poems in response to Rouault's Miserere); Mappa Mundi libretto - Song of the mapmaker - (music David Ventura) performed in Hereford Cathedral; Birmingham Poet Laureate 1997-98. As well as other prizes has won the Irish National and First & Second in the Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition. Recent work includes words for a musical composition by Liz Johnson, 'Breeze Fingers'. Poems widely published in magazines and anthologies. Books of poetry include Setting the poem to words, Crag Inspector (a poem of Bardsey Island), Work, the work (a poem of Beethoven), and Running Out (Five Seasons Press 2006), which includes much of the work from the above residencies &c.