Deaths of the Poets

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From Dylan Thomas’s eighteen straight whiskies to Sylvia Plath’s desperate suicide in the gas oven of her Primrose Hill kitchen; from Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death warrant in a smudge of arterial blood, the deaths of poets have often cast a backward shadow on their work.

The post-Romantic lore of the dissolute drunken poet 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 an illusion , or is there some essential truth behind it? What is the price of poetry?

In this book, two contemporary poets embark on a series of journeys to the death places of poets of the past, in part as pilgrims, but also as investigators, interrogating the myth.

A rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing.
Claire Harman, Evening Standard

About Michael Symmons Roberts

Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

About Paul Farley

Paul Farley is the author of four collections of poetry and has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the E.M. Forster Award. He broadcasts regularly on radio and presents The Echo Chamber on Radio 4. Edgelands, co-written with Michael Symmons Roberts, received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award and the 2011 Foyles Best Book of Ideas Award and was serialised as Radio 4 Book of the Week.

Details

Imprint: Vintage
Published: 08/02/2018
ISBN: 9780099581321
Length: 432 pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 27mm x 129mm
Weight: 342g
Price: £9.99

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Paperback 2018
Ebook 2017

Deaths of the Poets

Format:

Buy the book from:

A rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing.

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.

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.

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.

It is a thoughtful book, structured as a series of pilgrimages to the places where poets have died.

The authors are agreeable, well-informed and slyly humorous company.

Poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts make a comic routine out of their own relative longevity… An absorbing, if melancholy trip.

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.

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.

About Michael Symmons Roberts

About Paul Farley

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