Chapter and verse on the bizarre side of today’s poets

Death Comes for the Poets

You don’t have to be a poet to enjoy this black comedy, but it probably helps. It can be read purely as a tightly-plotted detective story, complete with a series of unusually imaginative murders. But the motivating force is a lively satire on the contemporary poetry scene in Britain.

The authors are both distinguished poets, with a thorough mastery of that strange trade. Donegal-born Matthew Sweeney is Writer in Residence at University College, Cork, while London-born John Hartley Williams has published 12 collections of poems, and has lived in Berlin since 1976.

The epigraph from Yeats’s Autobiographies takes on a new significance in light of the mention of death in the book’s title: ‘. . . I remember saying one night at the Cheshire Cheese when more poets than usual had come: None of us can say who will succeed or even who has or has not talent. The only thing certain about us is that we are too many.’

The story opens with the last evening of Fergus Diver, a poet whose day job is as restaurant critic for The Observer. His Sunday night reading to the Kent Marshes Poetry Society in a room above a pub had been, in his own words, “a clunker” — a long and uncomfortable journey from London, a rambling incoherent introduction by the octogenarian chairman, a comatose audience, only one book signed and none sold. He is so quick to leave the room that he gets to the bar before his hosts, and is temporarily in danger of having to pay for his own drink — apparently a major disaster in a poet’s life. Diver consoles himself by an elaborate meal at an Indian restaurant. All goes well until he samples a complimentary dish of mushrooms with a curiously astringent flavour . . . no points for guessing that he has been poisoned, but the description of his death agonies are a poetic tour de force.

The satire, while biting, is also good-humoured. The business of giving workshops in which egos can clash, and the sexual liaisons that form at residential ones, come under scrutiny. The Irish poet, Barnaby Brown, is particularly susceptible to the charms of his female admirers. The younger generation is represented by Daniel Crane, who rejects the traditional path and creates a comic-book character called BardSlayer, who goes viral in cyberspace as the murders increase.

One by one, the poets reach their sticky ends. Their deaths — by drowning, by lightning (apparently), trampled by a donkey, by poisoned dart, and other horrors, all turn out to be related to motifs in the poets’ work, which can be confirmed by an appendix of horribly mediocre poems written by each of the victims.

The authors’ enjoyment at co-authoring this book comes across strongly, both in the gentle skewering of the contemporary scene, the loving descriptions of food and drink, and in their construction of a well-paced detective story incorporating the conventions of various traditions to great comic effect. Even if you’ve never been to a poetry reading, there is plenty here to enjoy.