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The Poets' Wives

The Poets' Wives

by David Park (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2014

    $3.28
Synopsis

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.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 304
 Edition: 01
 Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 27 Feb 2014
ISBN 10: 1408846470
ISBN 13: 9781408846476
Book Overview: 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

Media Reviews
Echoes of the great Brian Moore are evident as is a sensibility similar to that of the US master Richard Ford, but Park is more than merely a fine writer with a great deal to say ... he is an astute storyteller whose vision is sustained by instinct, intelligent observation and a sense of responsibility * Eileen Battersby, Irish Times *
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 *
Park writes prose like a poet * The Times *
Brings his celebration of language, and humanity, to every page * Daily Mail *
One of the shrewdest observers of the way we live now * Independent *
Park is an excellent writer: psychologically astute, lyrically unflinching * Daily Telegraph *
Park has always stood apart from his contemporaries with a cool and beautifully poised style that renders the most ordinary moments into perfectly measured prose * Dermot Bolger *
David Park is a great writer, that's the truth * Glenn Patterson *
Author Bio
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.