Stammers, John

views updated

Stammers, John

PERSONAL: Born in Islington, England. Education: King's College, London, England.

ADDRESSES: Home—Islington, England. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd., London N1 9RR, England.

CAREER: Poet and educator. King's College, London, England, associate; also associated with two colleges of Cambridge University.

AWARDS, HONORS: Blue Nose Poetry competition winner, 1999, for "The Wolf Man"; Forward/Waterstones Prize for Best First Collection and shortlisted for Whitbread Poetry Award, both 2001, both for Panoramic Lounge-Bar.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Panoramic Lounge-Bar, Picador (London, England), 2001.

Stolen Love Behaviour, Picador (London, England), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: John Stammers is a London poet whose debut collection, Panoramic Lounge-Bar, received wide critical recognition for both its serious and more humorous poems. "John Stammers' first collection is peopled with the likes of Frank O'Hara, Gilbert and Sullivan, James Joyce, Roddy Lumsden, and Greta Garbo," commented Jane Holland in the Poetry Review. Holland went on to write, "His talent as a poet is real and unmistakable…. There is a sense in these poems that sleight-of-hand … is being used to divert us from the guiding intelligence behind the juggler behind the poet." Noting that while reading the poems she sometimes forgot that it is his first collection, Holland commented on the author's "sheer talent and technical expertise, outclassing other debuts around it with the ease and confidence of a born poet."

In his second collection of poems, Stolen Love Behaviour, the author writes about failed loves, urban landscapes, and various notable people, such as his poem "John Keats Walks Home Following a Night Spent Reading Homer with Cowden Clarke." "If his poems share a mood we might call that mood retrospect, reasonable bitterness, a tightly-controlled esprit d'escalier," wrote Stephen Burt on the Tower Poetry Web site. Noting that "Stammers casts himself as a literary latecomer, a ghostly, witty commentator, whether at his own breakups or at other people's epiphanies," Burt added: "Stammers' long and information-dense lines, thick with fine-tuned emotion and cityscape detail, place him among older poets … whose repertoires include travel poetry and speculative linguistic investigation."