The Death of a Greek Lover

A landmark work dedicated to the author’s partner, this set of linked poems explores love and loss through the lens of myth, faith, and art. Heavily influenced by the work of C. P. Cavafy, Plante’s paen to his beloved will stay with readers long after the last verse.

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. Plante’s verse tribute to Stangos, The Death of a Greek Lover, combines the austere and the sensual in ways reminiscent of Cavafy, while possessing a passionate sincerity of its own. 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.