Jonathan Mcaloon

Death Comes For The Poets by Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams – review

Death Comes For The Poets is an unliterary book with a highly literary subject. It’s usually done the other way around: exquisite quodrilogies about American car salesmen; towering works about bored wives in French villages. Here we have a thriller, but one written by two eminent contemporary poets in which poets are murdered in correspondent ways to their work. A man who wrote a collection called Stray gets torn apart by dogs. A womaniser who writes about oceans gets lured to his watery death by a beautiful woman. Is the murderer jealous of these poets’ reputations? or is somebody trying to create much needed publicity for the art? Luckily, there is a suitably well-read sleuth on hand – Victor Priest: celebrity art detective, expert on literary forgeries and poet manqué. While investigating these murders he also finds the time to acquire lost Kafka manuscripts and a translation of Dante by T.S. Eliot. Other props of the genre are similarly versified: even the creepy parrot knows a bit of Heinrich Heine.

As is the case with contemporary poetry, the audience for this novel will predominantly be people who write contemporary poetry. If you’re one of these you may recognise the character types: the pentameter stickler; the jaunty stoner; the dour, one-time activist; the vivacious woman who the previous types respect; the new-agey woman they don’t; the ‘regional’ poet. In keeping with satiric traditions, names are fully loaded – Damian Krapp, Amelia Quirk and Melinda (‘Miss’) Speling. Then there are the gossipy gripes: the rivalries and bad food at residential courses; rejection letters; Arts Council bureaucracy and jargon (‘traditional traditions,’ ‘new media,’); there being no such thing as free verse…

The collaborative authorship could have been problematic for continuity but characters rarely live long enough to need to be consistent.

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