John Stammers

John Stammers (born 1954 Islington, London) is a British poet and writing tutor.

Contents

Life

Stammers read philosophy at King's College London and is an Associate of Kings' College. He took up writing poetry in his 40s, joining Michael Donaghy’s City University poetry group. Stammers now teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London and City Lit. [1] In 2002/03 he was appointed Judith E Wilson Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He has edited Magma magazine and is convenor of the British and Irish Contemporary Poetry Conference. His work has also appeared in London Review of Books. [2] In 2009 he won third place in the 2009 National Poetry Competition (UK).

Stammers lives in Hampstead, London with his wife Isolde and their sons Jay and Freddie. [3]

Critical assessment

Cressida Connolly in The Daily Telegraph asks: "Is it possible to be a first-rate romantic poet and yet make mention of Ovaltine, Plexiglas, Rock Hudson, a macramé plant-holder, visiting the chiropodist and wiping dog-mess off a shoe? In the case of John Stammers, the answer is a resounding yes. His first collection, Panoramic Lounge Bar, introduced poetry readers to a spectacular talent and won the Forward Prize for the best new poet of 2001. Stammers's voice is idiosyncratic, at once tender and funny, fresh and familiar."[4]

Critic Stephen Burt reviews Stolen Love Behaviour: "We know that a talented 21st-century English poet (Paul Farley, say) can render the 21st-century city in quick, ironic, breezy sketches. And we know that an extraordinarily talented 21st-century London poet (let's call him, for convenience, Mark Ford) can pursue the opacities of modern sociolects along with the bafflements of adult life. Can the same 21st-century poet do both? In cityscapes, domestic interiors, and briskly ironized variations on inherited language-games, John Stammers' second collection tries, and largely succeeds. His less ambitious poems capture moments in (or after) failed romance (less often, successful ones), or days spent in alien urban sites: the more ambitious works explore interiorities, wishes, hypotheticals, "director's cuts of the lives we've never led,/ unreleased and maiden from the archives."[5]

Awards

Works

References

External links