David Plante’s spare and elegiac ‘The Death of a Greek Lover’

David Plante's verse tribute to his longtime partner, combining the austere and the sensual in ways reminiscent of C. P. Cavafy THE DEATH OF A GREEK LOVER David Plante 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. 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. BUY THE BOOK   For three days only, The Death of a Greek Lover is available at 25% off along with David Plante’s memoir Difficult Women: DIFFICULT WOMEN A MEMOIR OF THREE David Plante BUY THE BOOK   Read two poems from The Death of a Greek Lover This is a poem of snow falling In a winter wood, the smell Of resin in the gelid air, And a deer alert and still, The trees are crystalline, The ice so clear the weeds show In the current of the stream, And no pathways or stone foundations Left from some other time, And no one, ever, to fell the trees, The wind and glacial rocks forever pure In this inviolable land, and no one there. — Help me, Blessed Mother, To open the door I lean against, The door without a handle, a lock or key. My faith in love is buried with my lover’s Filthy skeleton in a rotting suit, And all my thoughts are base. Help me to love still, help me Sustain the love that was my faith In loving him, for that faith’s now gone, And every morning I wake in the dark That I must accept as a fact of my life, As if I’d never believed that his love was all my life. Open the door, Holy Mother, open up The door, that flowers fall about me To the floor, and I see a light from within. You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from NYRB. You can choose the types of mailings you wish to receive: Update preferences   New York Review Books 207 East 32nd Street New York, NY 10016-6305 Not a subscriber? Sign up for our newsletter here. Unsubscribe