All You Who Sleep Tonight
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 | |
| Author | Vikram Seth |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | poetry |
| Publisher | Vintage |
Publication date | June 18, 1991 |
| Pages | 61 pages |
| ISBN | 9780679730255 |
All You Who Sleep Tonight[1] is a 1990 collection of poems by Vikram Seth.
British composer Jonathan Dove set eight of the quatrains and five other poems to music for Nuala Willis in a 1996 song cycle of the same name.[2]
The collection is grouped into five sections:
- Romantic Residues, poems which reflect on feelings of love and their effects, or after-effects
- In Other Voices, poems from the viewpoint of people in other times and places, such as a doctor in Hiroshima on the day of the atomic bomb
- In Other Places, poems about places and people encountered in his travels
- Quatrains, four-line poems on themes as diverse as insomnia and table manners
- Meditations of the Heart, ranging from admiration of the Russian dissident poet Irina Ratushinskaya to the title poem of the volume.
A selection of the poems has been set by British composer Jonathan Dove, and recorded on an award-winning CD for the Naxos label by mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon and pianist Andrew Matthews-Owen.
