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‘Beneath the sharp social satire lurks a psychological insight, a sensitivity to a profound cultural inheritance’ – The Times
In 2023, the Forward Prize-winning poet John Stammers experienced a sudden and life-threatening health crisis that brought him to the brink of death. Miraculously, he survived and returned to the poems he had been writing, which now, inevitably, took a darker turn. Queries on Death, the Infinite, and Irrational Numbers is the book that was halted that day and was subsequently refocused on exploring words that might contain and question such profound experiences.
At the heart of this exploration is the Grand Guignol humor of ‘Death Songs’ – a sequence born from his hospitalization and transcribed afterwards. Stammers is an honest and clear-eyed witness to the nature of death and its related phenomena, drawing influences from Berryman’s famous work and from wildly surreal hallucinatory experiences that can accompany extreme physical crises.
Alongside ‘Death Songs’, the collection features poems of technical ingenuity as well as those of sincere tenderness; poems that examine love and intimacy within a broader emotional and intellectual context. Here are meditations on knowledge that still retain the ‘essential gaudiness’ of poetry; and elegies for artist friends that reflect on the fleeting nature of fame and charisma.
More than ever before, Stammers introduces a philosophical dimension that elevates the work from purely literary to genuinely metaphysical. Queries on Death, the Infinite, and Irrational Numbers marks the triumphant return of one of contemporary poetry’s leading stylists.
‘A range of references from the gritty to the elegantly bleak, as if Tristan Corbière were trying to recover from an affair with Angelina Jolie’ – Clive James on Interior Night
Pages: 64, Year of Publication: 0224, Dimensions: 15.3x15.3cm
Manufacturer
- Author
- John Stammers
- Publisher
- Macmillan Publishers
- Language
- English
- Subtitle
- -
- Cover
- Soft
- Number of Pages
- 64
- Release Date
- 13/11/2025
- Publication Date
- 2025
- Dimensions
- -
- ISBN-13
- 9781035082681
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