The Poets' Wives

From award-winning writer David Park, an absorbing account of the lives of the women most important to three poets: William Blake, Osip Mandlestam and an imagined contemporary Irish poet.

Three women, each destined to play the role of a poet’s wife: Catherine Blake, the wife of William Blake – a poet, painter and engraver who struggles for recognition in a society that dismisses him as a madman; Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry costs him his life under Stalin’s terror; and the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage during the days after her husband’s death as she seeks to fulfil his final wish.

Set across continents and centuries, and in very different circumstances, these three women confront the contradictions between art and life, contemplate their emotional and physical sacrifices for another’s creativity, and struggle with infidelities that involve not only the flesh, but ultimately poetry itself. They find themselves custodians of their husbands’ work, work that has been woven with love’s intimacies and which has shaped their own lives in the most unexpected of ways.