The Professor of Poetry by Grace McCleen - review by Memphis Barker

Memphis Barker

Stone Agonistes

The Professor of Poetry

By

Sceptre 296pp £14.99
 

Rather threadbare as a love story, Grace McCleen’s swelling second novel takes literature as its passion: how to make it, how to read it, how to feel it in your bones. Barely a page goes by without a dab of Milton or T S Eliot. This is in itself no bad thing – great novels have been written about writing – but here a syrupy love of words, shared by narrator and author, ends up smothering what promise The Professor of Poetry initially offers.

We meet narrator Elizabeth Stone as a 53-year-old English professor in a London university and follow her as she returns to her alma mater. Her ostensible aim is to write a thesis on the ‘poetics of sound’, though lurking beneath is an unfinished romance with Edward Hunt, her old tutor.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

RLF - March

A Mirror - Westend

Follow Literary Review on Twitter