| Title | : | The Poets' Stairwell |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1876044802 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781876044800 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 326 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2015 |
The Poets’ Stairwell revitalises the picaresque novel. Vibrant, sensuous and layered, it has a tumble of characters and pranks. Anarchist puckish Beamish, the Isadora Duncan-like Eva, class warrior, Branca, a libidinous translator of poems with Jelena, her iconoclast daughter, Luc Courlai a jailed French philosopher, Titus the Yankee acrobat who cradles his gun like a baby, Mr Hark a saintly Irish funeral director, Willi a German truck driver versed in Thomas Aquinas and sensible Rhee, Henry’s girlfriend—amongst others.
Behind this company lives a virtual one of poets and philosophers from Yeats to Plato, attending as time and place invoke them. Our picaros’ adventures allow Alan Gould to discuss poetic inspiration from womb to self-conscious maturity.
The tale of Martha the American plumber will make you cry. There is Sir John Cue the obstetrician who delivers Boon twice across a lifetime to round out the plot. And the meeting with Ted Hughes is not to be missed.
The Poets' Stairwell Reviews
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Is poetry in a poet’s DNA? Or is something somehow acquired, when after trudging up a dark and constricted stairwell, the poet bursts into the light and sees with clarity?
Two Australian friends, Claude Boon and Henry Luck, take off on the Grand Tour of Europe to pay homage to the poets of the past, and to find their muses. Luck is the younger, a scholarly genius destined for great things in the world of poetry, while Boon, the narrator, becomes less sure of his destiny. Together they make their way through England, the land of their birth, and on to Ireland and Europe – from Greece and Turkey to ventures behind the Iron Curtain.
The book is subtitled a picaresque novel and the escapades follow the form but the novel has a coherence that I found missing from (dare I say it?)
CandideSublime, funny, clever. To read the rest of my review please visit
https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/05/17/t... -
Aussie poets go off to Europe to pay homage to their heroes and get into a few scrapes on the way. The subtitle of The Poets' Stairwell is 'a picaresque novel'; I would better call it a Bildungsroman or, as it most certainly is , a roman a clef (with grave accent !)....the poets in question being the author Alan Gould (Claude Boon) and, I suspect, Philip Mead (Henry Luck).....but who, I ask myself is the surnameless Peter, the Aussie poet they see in Venice who "does more the athletics than the poems.He climbs on table, he takes his clothes off." ? ...he sounds more interesting than Boon and Luck !
