The Death of a Greek Lover

David Plante made his name as a novelist with his first book, The Ghost of Henry James (1970), then with a dozen other novels including the Francoeur Trilogy (1978-82)–The Family, The Woods, and The Country–a story of the complex relations within a family and between the family’s French-Canadian culture and the New England Anglophone world around them. He made his name as memoirist with Difficult Women (1983), about his vexed and deep friendships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer, then with Becoming a Londoner (2013) and Worlds Apart (2015), both rich in gossip and in psychological insight about famous and infamous figures in the literary and artistic worlds. He now lives in Lucca, Italy.

In 1965 he met the poet and editor Nikos Stangos, with whom he lived until Stangos’ death in 2004. In their life together, Plante learned to read and write Greek poetry, and absorbed the profoundly straightforward and unmetaphoric style of C. P. Cavafy. David Plante’s verse tribute to Nikos Stangos, The Death of a Greek Lover, is his first published book of poems—a sequence of separate poems that combines to make a single long poem.

In his novels, David Plante perfected his technique of combining exact observation of social and psychological detail with an implicit but unmistakable sense of transcendent meaning. That technique is everywhere in the clear intensity of his poems, which are simultaneously direct, intense expressions of love and loss, and speculative explorations of what poetry, myth, and faith can say about such things. The Death of a Greek Lover is as moving as it is artful.