Queries on Death, the Infinite and Irrational Numbers

‘Beneath the sharp social satire lurks a psychological insight, a sensitivity to a profound cultural inheritance’ The Times In 2023 the poet John Stammers was struck by a sudden and life-threatening health crisis and came very close to death. By some miracle he survived and was able to return 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 stopped in its tracks that day and which subsequently focused in pursuit of the words that might contain and question such experience. Central to this enquiry is the Grand Guignol humour of ‘Death Songs’ – a sequence born of his hospitalization and transcribed in its aftermath. Stammers is a frank and clear-eyed witness on the nature of death and its concomitants, drawing variously on Berryman’s famous work and on a wildly surreal hallucinatory experience that can accompany extreme bodily crises. Set around ‘Death Songs’ are poems of technical surprise alongside those of candid tenderness; poems that consider love and love-making within a wider emotional and intellectual context. Here are epistemological meditations that nonetheless preserve the ‘essential gaudiness’ of poetry; and elegies for artist friends that consider the ephemeral nature of fame and charisma. More than ever before, Stammers brings a philosophical dimension that raises the stakes from the purely literary into the genuinely metaphysical. Queries on Death, the Infinite and Irrational Numbers marks the bravura return of one of contemporary poetry’s foremost stylists. ‘A frame of reference ranging from the scabrous to the desolately chic, as if Tristan Corbière were trying to get over an affair with Angelina Jolie’ Clive James on Interior Night

About the Author :
John Stammers was born in Islington and now lives in Oxfordshire. As a teacher he has been associated with two Cambridge colleges as well as King’s College London, of which he was appointed an Associate after reading philosophy there as an undergraduate. He was one of several poets who emerged through the tutelary example of the late Michael Donaghy, publishing his debut Panoramic Lounge-bar in 2001, which went on to win the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Stolen Love Behaviour followed, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Interior Night too. John has edited The Picador Book of Love Poems and a selection of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Faber’s Poet to Poet series.

Review :
Beneath the sharp social satire lurks a psychological insight, a sensitivity to a profound cultural inheritance A frame of reference ranging from the scabrous to the desolately chic, as if Tristan Corbière were trying to get over an affair with Angelina Jolie His talent is unignorable One of Stammers's most impressive qualities is the ease with which he moves through a whole range of styles and tones, his constant capacity to surprise A spectacular talent . . . Stammers's voice is idiosyncratic, at once tender and funny, fresh and familiar