Drinks With Dead Poets
A Season of Poe, Whitman, Byron, and the Brontes
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A spirited homage to the departed literary greats—set in an entrancing English village—this novel tells the tale of a profound autumn term with Poe, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, and the Brontës.
“I am walking along a country lane with no earthly idea why . . .”
Poet Glyn Maxwell wakes up in a mysterious village one autumn day. He has no idea how he got there—is he dead? In a coma? Dreaming?—but he has a strange feeling there’s a class to teach. And isn’t that the poet Keats wandering down the lane? Why not ask him to give a reading, do a Q and A, hit the pub with the students afterwards?
Soon the whole of the autumn term stretches ahead, with Byron, Yeats and Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, the Brownings, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, and many more all on their way to give readings in the humble village hall.
And everything these famed personalities say—in class, on stage, at the Cross Keys pub—comes verbatim from these poets’ diaries, essays, or letters. A dreamy novel of a profound autumn term with Poe, Yeats, Whitman, Dickinson, and the Brontës.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Famous poets help a teacher with his writing seminar at a dreamlike university in this metafictional novel from poet Maxwell (One Thousand Nights and Counting). Glyn Maxwell is a writer and professor teaching a class at a remote unnamed college, and every week the poet he is teaching to the class mysteriously shows up to do a reading. Nobody seems to find it odd when Lord Byron and Walt Whitman mysteriously show up on campus nobody except for Glyn himself, who is trying to figure out how he arrived on campus, where he is exactly, how he ended up teaching this class, and why every day is a Thursday. The author Maxwell blurs the lines between prose and poetry and between fiction and reality as he takes readers on a surreal journey full of literary criticism and metrical analyses, all guided by the visiting poets who speak entirely in quotes from their real-life journals and letters. The surreal quality of the writing is offset by Maxwell's wonderfully dry sense of humor. Readers of metafiction will enjoy this rabbit hole of luminary poets.
