Deaths of the Poets
Deaths of the Poets
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Hardback
£14.99
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9780224097543
Number of Pages: 432
Published: 09/02/2017
Width: 14.4 cm
Height: 22.2 cm
A Sunday Times / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year
From Chatterton's Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats' death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood; from Dylan Thomas's eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath's desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen or John Berryman's leap from a bridge onto the frozen Mississippi, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work.
The post-Romantic myth of the dissolute drunken poet - exemplified by Thomas and made iconic by his death in New York - has fatally skewed the image of poets in our culture. Novelists can be stable, savvy, politically adept and in control, but poets should be melancholic, doomed and self-destructive. Is this just a myth, or is there some essential truth behind it: that great poems only come when a poet's life is pushed right to an emotional knife-edge of acceptability, safety, security? What is the price of poetry?
In this book, two contemporary poets undertake a series of journeys - across Britain, America and Europe - to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, honouring inspirational writers, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth. The result is a book that is, in turn, enlightening and provocative, eye-wateringly funny and powerfully moving.
A rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing. -- Claire Harman * Evening Standard * So much material of such innate interest is presented with just the right balance of panache, wit, insight and elegy... A good, clever, kindly and enjoyable book it is, like eavesdropping on two smarter friends when they are sparking off each other... Farley and Roberts are always entertaining and illuminating, gentle guides and quixotic questers. -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday * Deaths of the Poets is packed with anecdotes and macabre frisons; its forays through some of poetry's more sensational edge-lands make for a compelling read. -- Nicholas Roe * Literary Review * A terrifically entertaining book: thoughtful, funny, informative, with an eye for good quotes and anecdotes, and wide-ranging in both the distance it travels and the material on which it draws. -- Blake Morrison * Guardian * Deaths of the Poets is a gripping, witty read, but also asks serious questions about the way the post-Romantic myth of the doomed poet skews the way we interpret their work. -- Kathryn Hughes * Mail on Sunday * It is a thoughtful book, structured as a series of pilgrimages to the places where poets have died. -- Lara Feigel * Irish Independent * The authors are agreeable, well-informed and slyly humorous company. -- Dan Brotzel * UK Press Syndication * Poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts make a comic routine out of their own relative longevity... An absorbing, if melancholy trip. -- Suzi Feay * Financial Times * On their pilgrimage, Michael and Paul honour their poetic heroes, but also investigate and interrogate the myth, sending themselves up in the process. The result is a book... that is enlightening and provocative, eye-wateringly funny and powerfully moving. * About Manchester * The book is a fascinating if slightly ghoulish examination of poets' deathbeds, and sometimes their last words, such as Philip Larkin's bleak remark, "I am going to the inevitable"... Deaths of the Poets is highly readable, informative and resonating with a literary hinterland. -- Francis Philips * Catholic Herald * It's an undertaking that explores the often linked ideas of poetry and mortality, but with a questing humour. -- Carl Wilkinson * Financial Times * A witty and erudite journey into the characters of doomed poets using location as a steer. -- Melvyn Bragg * Observer *
