Philip Larkin: The Sunday Sessions I first heard Philip Larkin reading his own poetry on a scratched album burrowed from Holborn Library 30 years ago. Faber Vinyl have reissued the 26 newly-restored poems on an LP called The Sunday Sessions, with a picture of the lugubrious librarian gazing out with those watchful eyes. There's no trace of the childhood stammer in the readings, just a relaxed, animated voice delivering magnificent, bruising poems. His dry, elegant voice brings out the wit of Toads and the sadness of The Building. Larkin was a good mimic, too, parodying an upper class dolt in Vers de Société and a lower class landlady in Mr Bleaney. A hint of the darker Larkin comes in the brutal The Old Fools. As a young student I was probably oblivious to the bleakness and fear discernible in his deadpan delivery. ("the power of choosing . . . gone"). Gloomy bugger as he was, Larkin also had a romantic and zestful streak, hence his love of the joyous jazz man Sidney Bechet. It's wonderful to hear on vinyl how uplifting the bald and bespectacled superpoet could be. As he chirps in For Sidney Bechet: On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes. The Sunday Sessions: Philip Larkin Reading His Poetry (Faber Vinyl)