The Poets' Wives

Description

From award-winning writer David Park, an absorbing account of the lives of the women most important to three poets: William Blake, Osip Mandlestam and an imagined contemporary Irish poet 'An outstanding novel, written in luminous accessible prose, thoroughly enjoyable and much deeper even than the sum of its excellent parts' Irish Times 'The Poets' Wives is a marvellous triptych: lyrical, respectful of creativity but also sharply sceptical' Sunday Times __________________ Three women, each destined to play the role of a poet's wife: Catherine Blake, the wife of William Blake - a poet, painter and engraver who struggles for recognition in a society that dismisses him as a madman; Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry costs him his life under Stalin's terror; and the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage during the days after her husband's death as she seeks to fulfil his final wish. Set across continents and centuries, and in very different circumstances, these three women confront the contradictions between art and life, contemplate their emotional and physical sacrifices for another's creativity, and struggle with infidelities that involve not only the flesh, but ultimately poetry itself. They find themselves custodians of their husbands' work, work that has been woven with love's intimacies and which has shaped their own lives in the most unexpected of ways. Deeply insightful and beautifully wrought, The Poets' Wives is David Park at his best - a novelist whose work has the power to bring the hidden from the shadows, into a delicate and shimmering light.

David Park has written eight previous books including The Big Snow, Swallowing the Sun, The Truth Commissioner and, most recently, The Light of Amsterdam. He has won the Authors' Club First Novel Award, the Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature, the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the University of Ulster's McCrea Literary Award, three times. He has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and been shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award three times. In 2014 he was longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. He lives in County Down, Northern Ireland.

He writes prose of gravity and grace ... Line for line, it is hard to think of a more skilful contemporary Irish novelist. He shares with John McGahern a refusal of cheap flamboyance, with Dermot Bolger a sense of suppressed fury ... There is a Coetzeean accuracy to the writing * Joseph O'Connor, Guardian * Recent years have seen an explosion of books about wives of famous men ... The Poets' Wives ... Is a fine contribution to this genre ... The Poets' Wives is a marvellous triptych: lyrical, respectful of creativity but also sharply sceptical * David Grylls, Sunday Times * Sparse, lyrical and yet clear-headed prose leaves no room for false notes, nostalgia or self-serving mythologies. One of the quiet men of Irish writing, he also possesses one of its truest voices and has built up a deeply impressive oeuvre without fuss or pyrotechnics ... infused with the depth of character and emotion that are hallmarks of his work as a novelist of enormous sensitivity -- Dermot Bolger * Irish Mail on Sunday * Marvellous * Sunday Times Must Reads * Intriguing and impressive ... With its stylistic felicity ... its concern with integrity and with upholders of humane, and humanistic values, The Poets' Wives displays without ostentation its author's resourcefulness and versatility * Patricia Craig, Times Literary Supplement * An outstanding novel, written in luminous accessible prose, thoroughly enjoyable and much deeper even than the sum of its excellent parts * Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Irish Times * Beautifully wrought -- Holly Williams * Independent on Sunday * Intensely evocative, thought-provoking -- Anita Sethi * Observer *