A Sunday Times / Daily Telegraph Book of the Year
What is the price of poetry? An examination of how the
deaths of great poets have shaped our culture's distorted sense of
poetry
Michael Symmons Roberts (Author)
Michael Symmons Roberts was born in Preston, Lancashire in
1963. He has published six collections of poetry and received a
number of accolades including the Forward Prize, the Costa Poetry
Award and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. As a librettist, his work has
been performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world.
An award-winning broadcaster and dramatist, he has published two
novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan
University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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, 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.
A rollicking mixture of literary biography, commentary, travelogue
and anecdotage, much of it deeply amusing.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*Mail on Sunday*
It is a thoughtful book, structured as a series of pilgrimages to
the places where poets have died.
*Irish Independent*
The authors are agreeable, well-informed and slyly humorous
company.
*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.
*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.
*Catholic Herald*
It’s an undertaking that explores the often linked ideas of poetry
and mortality, but with a questing humour.
*Financial Times*
A witty and erudite journey into the characters of doomed poets
using location as a steer.
*Observer*
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