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

‘He seeks to contain multitudes’, commented one reviewer of John Stammers’ poetry, and in this long-awaited fourth collection Stammers’ restlessly eclectic range is very much in evidence. Here are poems of technical surprise alongside those of candid tenderness; poems that set 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.

Central to the book is the grand guignol humour of ‘Death Songs’ – a sequence born of his own near-fatal collapse and written 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. More than ever before, he 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