The Sunday Sessions Unabridged Compact Disc [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

'This is the first time I have read before such a large audience,' Larkin once said on Radio 4. A tiny pause. 'And if I have anything to with it, the last.' He seemed to prefer the smallest audience possible whether it was George Hartley, his tape spools turning slowly as Larkin recited his verse, swallowing both his stammer and annoyance with the noisy recording conditions; or here after Sunday lunch in a converted garage with only his sound engineer friend John Weeks for company.

We too are an audience of one for any poet we read, but the complicity between reader and writer is where Larkin particularly thrives. It's implicit in his reasons for writing ('I suppose the kind of response I am seeking from the reader is, Yes, I know what you mean, life is like that') and explicit as he invites us inside to share his bleak though to me never entirely hopeless view ('You can see how it was', 'Think of being them', 'We know beyond doubt'). The rewards for going with him are the vivid journeys and consolations he provides.

'The Sunday Sessions' lifts that complicity to another level. Now we're with Larkin as his gently see-sawing delivery sets the scenes for his poems. These are rendered with extraordinary precision. In 'Mr Bleaney', we see 'Flowered curtains, thin and frayed/Fall to within five inches of the sill'. Condensing our waiting-room culture of patience into four brief lines, Larkin shows us, 'There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup/Like an airport lounge, but those who tamely sit/On rows of steel chairs turning the ripped mags/Haven't come far.' His pause in the last line of 'Home is so Sad' ensures we catch the god-awfulness of 'That vase'.

Then he gives the occupants of those settings a voice. Some are comic turns as he does Mr Bleaney's landlady, Warlock-Williams and booms 'here endeth' so we snigger even as 'the echoes snigger briefly'. Others are quizzical, delicate, finely balanced in debate with themselves. In 'An Arundel Tomb', the narrator has it out about the nature of love yet can't quite bring himself to come down on one side or the other, the optimism of the famous last line qualified by the preceding one. For the most part, the mood is benign. Only in 'The Old Fools' does Larkin himself seem to emerge from the poems, his voice rising as he heads for the final warning of 'We shall find out.' In that moment, it sounds as if he's telling us about his dread of endless extinction.

But don't be put off: the quotable lines and haunting images make this CD a must-have, the typo in the accompanying track-listing notwithstanding. Now all we need to do is persuade Faber to round up the rest of Larkin's readings on cassette and LP and reissue them digitally.

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