John Stammers
Encyclopedia
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 DonaghyMichael Donaghy
Michael Donaghy was an award-winning New York poet and musician, who lived in London from 1985.-Life and career:...
’s City University poetry group. Stammers now teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
and City Lit
City Lit
City Literary Institute is an adult education college based in central London, offering 3,000 part-time courses. It was established in 1919, with the purpose of educating London's workforce after the war...
. In 2002/03 he was appointed Judith E Wilson Fellow at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
. 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. 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.
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."Critic Stephen Burt
Stephen Burt
Stephen Burt is a literary critic, poet, and a professor who teaches at Harvard University.-Elliptical Poetry:Burt received significant attention for coining the term "elliptical poetry" in a 1998 book review of Susan Wheeler's book, Smokes, in Boston Review magazine...
reviews Stolen Love Behaviour: "We know that a talented 21st-century English poet (Paul Farley
Paul Farley
Paul Farley is an award-winning English poet. He studied painting at the Chelsea School of Art, and has lived in London, Brighton and Cumbria...
, 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
Mark Ford
-Life:He went to school in London, and attended Oxford University and, as a Kennedy Scholar, Harvard University. He studied for his doctorate at Oxford University on the poetry of John Ashbery, and has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writing, including on Raymond...
) 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."
Awards
- 2001 Forward Prize for Best First Collection (for Panoramic Lounge-Bar)
- 2001 Whitbread Poetry Award shortlisted (for Panoramic Lounge-Bar)
- 2005 TS Eliot Prize shortlisted
- 2005 Forward Prize for Best Collection
Works
- Panoramic Lounge-bar (Picador, 2001)
- Buffalo Bills (Donut Press, 2004)
- Stolen Love Behaviour (Picador, 2005)
- Interior Night (Picador, 2010)
- The Picador Book of Love Poems (Editor, Picsdor, 2011)