The Death of a Greek Lover

“David, these poems are wonderful. You have done the sublime thing—you’ve made art of your grief. The credibility of the poems is what gets to me. I believe in grief.” — Philip Roth“David Plante is a writer who makes a virtue of straying as far as possible from the orthodox views of places and people.” — The Contemporary Review

David Plante was born in 1940 and made his name as a novelist with The Ghost of Henry James (1970) and a dozen other novels, including the Francoeur Trilogy (1978–1982), a story of the complex relations within a family and between the family’s French Canadian culture and the anglophone New England world around them. He then made his name as a memoirist with Difficult Women (1983), about his vexed and deep friendships with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer; Becoming a Londoner (2013); and Worlds Apart (2015). He has taught at the University of Tulsa; Columbia University; and the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow. A citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom, he now lives in Lucca, Italy.