Stretto

Reviews / Votes

'David Wheatley has composed a text so intricately figured, made out of the tones and notes and embellishments of family life and of work and the many-faceted elements of the imagination, that it reflects precisely the impetus and forward motion of the musical movement its title describes. Each section is a bar of poetry both fitted within and overlaying the prose that describes it; each page and a half is measured to sing out exactly in the key and time signature to which it has been set. Wondrous.'- Kirsty Gunn

'A notable poet, David Wheatley has filled his first novel, Stretto, with music and light ... Time shifts, moving "now fast, now slowly, sometimes both at once" he observes regarding Bach's stretto technique. Similar patterning replaces conventional narrative in the novel. A brilliant debut.' - Ian Duhig, Irish Times

'Like Wheatley, this notetaker has left Ireland to work abroad, first in the north of England, then in northeast Scotland, where he teaches poetry to university students, reads, thinks, raises his children and writes. Along the way he muses on Bach, on the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, on his cat, on bagpipe music, on children's games, on university bureaucracy and on church windows. The result is a kind of intellectual inquiry that takes its bearings less from the novel than from the philosophical discipline of phenomenology ... this is also a book of luminous detail and careful attention to the texture of everyday life.' - James Pardon, Literary Review