Queries on Death, the Infinite and Irrational Numbers

‘Beneath the sharp social satire lurks a psychological insight, a sensitivity to a profound cultural inheritance’ – The Times In 2023 the Forward Prize-winning poet John Stammers was struck by a sudden and life-threatening health crisis which brought him to the verge of death. By some miracle he survived and was able to return to the poems he had been writing which now, inevitably, took a darker turn. Queries on Death, the Infinite and Irrational Numbers is the book that was stopped in its tracks that day and which subsequently focused in pursuit of the words that might contain and question such experience. Central to this enquiry is the Grand Guignol humour of ‘Death Songs’ – a sequence born of his hospitalization and transcribed in its aftermath. Stammers is a frank and clear-eyed witness on the nature of death and its concomitants, drawing variously on Berryman’s famous work and on a wildly surreal hallucinatory experience that can accompany extreme bodily crises. Set around ‘Death Songs’ are poems of technical surprise alongside those of candid tenderness; poems that consider love and love-making within a wider emotional and intellectual context. Here are epistemological meditations that nonetheless preserve the ‘essential gaudiness’ of poetry; and elegies for artist friends that consider the ephemeral nature of fame and charisma. More than ever before, Stammers brings a philosophical dimension that raises the stakes from the purely literary into the genuinely metaphysical. Queries on Death, the Infinite and Irrational Numbers marks the bravura return of one of contemporary poetry’s foremost stylists. ‘A frame of reference ranging from the scabrous to the desolately chic, as if Tristan Corbière were trying to get over an affair with Angelina Jolie’ – Clive James on Interior Night