Deaths of the Poets

Roberts, Michael Symmons ; Paul Farley

ISBN 10: 0224097547 / ISBN 13: 9780224097543

Published by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2017., 2017

1st edition, hardback, 8vo, 414pp, text clean and sound, signed by the author (Roberts) on a label on title page, with gift inscription, Very Good / Very Good dustwrapper. ISBN: 0224097547. Seller Inventory # 459104

Synopsis:

From Chatterton’s Pre-Raphaelite demise to Keats’ death-warrant in a smudge of arterial blood; from Dylan Thomas’ 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.

About the Author: Michael Symmons Roberts (Author)
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. His Selected Poems was published in 2016. He is a regular broadcaster, and librettist, working many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Paul Farley (Author)
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, cowritten 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.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Deaths of the Poets
Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2017.
Publication Date: 2017
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: 1st Edition