John Stammers – författare

With The Picador Book of Love Poems, award-winning poet John Stammers has created a unique collection: by pairing some of the finest love poems from centuries past with modern counterparts, he presents a book of surprising connections, echoes and juxtapositions, where classic and contemporary love poems shed new and unexpected light on one another. Here, old favourites from Spenser to Tennyson sit side by side with poems by Carol Ann Duffy and Michael Donaghy, the distance between the poets closed by their single timeless theme. Whether you’re feeling tempted, seduced, tormented, or rejected, or falling in love, or out of love – this is the perfect book to inspire, console, and give a voice to every facet of our deepest and most complex human emotion.

John Stammers's collection is witty, touching and clever - with brilliant images where love scenes are laced with irony and the details of contemporary life. He writes about irrelevant vampires living out their days on the sea front at Eastbourne; about flowers with 'fine pointed petals like scalpels' and is absolutely brilliant on music. His writing is vivid and assured.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was born in Stratford. He attended Balliol College, Oxford where he befriended the future Poet Laureate Robert Bridges. While at Balliol he converted to Catholicism and after graduating he entered the Society of Jesus and was ordained in 1877. Having burned his early poems on entering the Church, Hopkins eventually took up writing again but apart from a few poems that appeared in periodicals he was not published during his own lifetime. Since the publication of his poems in 1918 he has become one of the best known poets of the Victorian age and his are among the greatest poems written on the subject of faith and doubt.

‘Beneath the sharp social satire lurks a psychological insight, a sensitivity to a profound cultural inheritance’ – The TimesIn 2023 the Forward Prize-winning poet John Stammers was struck by a sudden and life-threatening health crisis which brought him to the verge of 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

With The Picador Book of Love Poems, award-winning poet John Stammers has created a unique collection: by pairing some of the finest love poems from centuries past with modern counterparts, he presents a book of surprising connections, echoes and juxtapositions, where classic and contemporary love poems shed new and unexpected light on one another. Here, old favourites from Spenser to Tennyson sit side by side with poems by Carol Ann Duffy and Michael Donaghy, the distance between the poets closed by their single timeless theme. Whether you’re feeling tempted, seduced, tormented, or rejected, or falling in love, or out of love – this is the perfect book to inspire, console, and give a voice to every facet of our deepest and most complex human emotion.

John Stammers's collection is witty, touching and clever - with brilliant images where love scenes are laced with irony and the details of contemporary life. He writes about irrelevant vampires living out their days on the sea front at Eastbourne; about flowers with 'fine pointed petals like scalpels' and is absolutely brilliant on music. His writing is vivid and assured.