The Death of a Greek Lover

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."David, these poems are wonderful. You have done the sublime thing—you've made art of your grief. The credibility of the poems is what gets to me. I believe in grief." — Philip Roth

"David Plante is a writer who makes a virtue of straying as far as possible from the orthodox views of places and people." — The Contemporary ReviewDavid Plante was born in 1940 and made his name as a novelist with The Ghost of Henry James (1970) and a dozen other novels, including the Francoeur Trilogy (1978-1982), a story of the complex relations within a family and between the family's French Canadian culture and the anglophone New England world around them. He then made his name as a memoirist with Difficult Women (1983; available as an NYRB Classic), about his vexed and deep friendships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer; Becoming a Londoner (2013); and Worlds Apart (2015). He has taught at the University of Tulsa; Columbia University; and the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow. A citzen of both the United States and the United Kingdom, he now lives in Lucca, Italy.