Such a varied life called, in Wilkinson’s view, for equally varied and layered poetry. Suite for Percy Grainger does him more than proud. The events of the life are here, but are presented on the page almost as a musical score: text under text, lines sliding and rising, visual tricks, collages, whatever it takes to reproduce on the page the music and the strangeness of Grainger’s life, and ‘to evoke … a future performance, realised at the meeting of text and reader’.

Grainger was ahead of his time but also very much of it, as we can see in Wilkinson’s poetic version of his composition ‘The Warriors’: ‘Slow and languorous shot through with surging onslaughts / of nudism Fastand flowing to the bass oboe.’ There is a delightful excess of this sort of thing. There is also great charm in the way the pages look: artless, typewriter-ish, and not ‘designed’. They are reminiscent of Tom Phillips’s A Humument, and just as beguiling. In several cases, as with ‘Humlet’, the poetry flatters the music and reminds us that this is a suite for Percy Grainger, not by him – one that we can perform without intercession, just as he would have wished.