Something for the Ghosts

The prevailing mood of David Constantine’s poetry is one of unease, often elegiac or comically edged, barbed with pain or tinged with pleasure. His new book Something for the Ghosts holds a worried and restless balance between celebration and anxiety, restraint and longing. Before ghosts speak, they need a drink of blood, according to Homer. Several of these poems summon up the dead and give them a voice, giving expression to the love and grief that go with them. All poetry, however private or distant its origins, is an attempt to give palpable life to what would otherwise be unapproachable by the senses. Every reader gives someone else’s poem a new lease of life, another metamorphosis in flesh and blood, and the poem quickens its new host like the necessary draught that Odysseus gave his ghosts at the mouth of Hades. David Constantine’s book does not exorcise any ghosts, but rather does the opposite, making them more vigorous and persistent in their haunting. This edition is now out of print but the whole collection is included in David Constantine's Collected Poems (2004).