The Poems of T.S. Eliot

Jeremy Irons has a wonderful voice. It is a treat to hear him read Eliot. However, this Audible edition leaves something to be desired. There are 72 “chapters” listed but without poem titles! So, you have to listen to a snippet of each one to figure out which one is which and make a “contents page” for yourself. This is the sort of thing that happens when books become “products”, sold by people who have no affinity for literature. Idiotic, especially considering that it would cost next to nothing to add a proper contents page to the audio-book. Irons originally read the poems for a BBC4 radio program. Their website lists the poems in order, but not the parts – for example, Chapter-21 of the audiobook begins “The Waste Land” with Part-1 i.e. “The Burial of the Dead”; Part-2 of “The Waste Land” is Chapter-22 i.e. “A Game of Chess” and so on. Unless you have your contents page handy it’s annoying to cue any section or poem.

An excellent reading by Irons, as one would expect.

My main quibble is with the selection of Poems, particularly (and only really) Disc 4. Of course most selections are what one would have expected and are no-brainers, but the overall quality of the selections would have been enhanced by substituting the excellent “Choruses from ‘The Rock'” for the “Cats” poems. There is a reason the “Cats” poems were never included in “The Collected Poems” editions of Eliot’s work, as he didn’t consider them to be part of his real oeuvre which he cared to see preserved for posterity. They are only famous because of the dreadful and banal Lloyd Webber musical.

Also, a quibble on format: Having seen the complaints from people who bought the “Audible” version, I don’t understand why the discs aren’t simply available for download as ordinary MP3 tracks, just as tracks from a regular musical CD would be, rather than in some single “Audible” file with unlabelled “chapter” contents making it difficult to navigate to what poem you want at any given time. I don’t do “Audible” or audiobooks in general, so this is why I bought the CDs. That way I could just rip the tracks to my computer (and leave out the “Cats” stuff altogether, and a few other minor poems I don’t care for) to put on my phone and iPod Classic, and could also edit the meta-data as desired (download services generally do a very poor job at this, so if you don’t edit the data yourself, things end up being sorted in bizarre ways, making it difficult to find what you want in your audio library; things as simple as filing by last name of author/artist, rather than first).

Jeremy Irons provides wonderful nuance and delivery. Hearing T.S. Eliot’s work is wonderful, because the scansion is complex and often requires re-reading certain lines to get it the way you think it probably should sound, were it read aloud. The actual recording here allows you to listen and enjoy sublime imagery Eliot put into The Wasteland and the Quartets. I like, too, that each poem is introduced with its title. I don’t think anybody who loves the work of this poet could go wrong getting this! I listen to it over and over.

T.S. Eliot comes to life as never before.
The poems that are superbly read on each of the four CDs are identified by name in a complete contents list.

This is an excellent collection of poems. The only real complaint I can think of is the contents table does not include names of poems in each chapter. The bookmark feature of audible can easily correct this. J Irons has a wonderful voice that carries the inflection and depth of emotion of the work flawlessly.

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