John Stammers, Queries on Death…

Queries on Death, the Infinite and Irrational Numbers, by John Stammers, 2025. Picador Poetry,ISBN 978 103508268 1 This is John Stammers’ fourth book. Each one part of a sequence, I suspect. So, let’s get the narrative out of the way first.It goes like this – he was putting together a new collection of poems after many years, when something catastrophic happened. We read of stroke units, cardio-thoracic, long-term recovery. Can we, I wondered, read the before and the after here?Putting a book together is like a piece of music, you establish the key/theme and then range the poems by revision through that. The first two books in particular, Panoramic Lounge Bar, and Stolen Love Behaviour can be read this way, either Spring and then Summer, or youth and prime. Then there was a long gap before Interior Night. I argue elsewhere that this last was very much a book of Freudian night (John Stammers had been a Freudian therapist at one point). The first two books had been bristling with…