David Plante

A landmark work dedicated to the author''s partner, this set of linked poems explores love and loss through the lens of myth, faith, and art. Heavily influenced by the work of C. P. Cavafy, Plante''s paen to his beloved will stay with readers long after the last verse.In 1965, the novelist David Plante met the poet and editor Nikos Stangos, with whom he lived until Stangos''s death in 2004. Over those years, Plante learned Greek and immersed himself in Greek poetry and found himself entranced by the profoundly straightforward and unmetaphoric style of the great C.P. Cavafy. Plante''s verse tribute to Stangos, The Death of a Greek Lover, combines the austere and the sensual in ways reminiscent of Cavafy, while possessing a passionate sincerity of its own. This beautiful sequence of short poems, a book-length elegy, brings a singular new sensibility and music to poetry in English.Plante''s fiction mixes exact social and psychological observation with an unmistakable and unsettling sense of transcendent meaning. The extraordinarily direct expression of love and loss found in The Death of a Greek Lover is similarly accompanied by an ongoing exploration of how poetry, myth, and faith can speak to our sorrowing selves.

In this short, masterful gem of a novel, David Plante’s seasoned narrator contemplates the connection between physical beauty and love, drawing on literary references and personal experiences to explore these themes.The unnamed narrator of this brief, urgent novel, a young novelist making his way in the literary world, writes of his fascination with two enigmatic, troubled young men, one a Boston Brahmin and the other a lofty undergraduate at England’s Cambridge University whom the narrator meets during his writer-in-residency. With each young man the narrator engages in a complex relationship filled with intellectual and erotic tension and each relationship leaves him feeling unfulfilled. By contrast, the narrator relates the story of his deep and abiding romantic life with an English poet, who introduces him to the remaining members of The Bloomsbury group as well as E.M. Forster and who guides him toward the publishers who bring out his early work. However, the poet dies young, and the narrator is once against cast adrift and his quest to find new, intimate interactions with the tragic young men he encounters causes him to reflect on the nature of beauty, love, and the intellectual life, emphasizing the transient and often unfulfilled desires that drive human connections.