A gay fandango
Usually, it’s poets who chance their arm with a novel. Rare is the established novelist who switches to verse. This could be because, while poetry is technically daunting with its rhyme and meter, the novel is apparently the easiest of all forms, without even the conventions and directions of the most basic screenplay. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Love Peacock was the most successful poet to turn to fiction, but in our own times poet-novelists rank among the most talented: Sylvia Plath, Ben Lerner, Vikram Seth, Craig Raine, Grace Nichols. Now, after half a century of writing superb novels, the English author Paul Bailey, well into his eighties, is publishing his second book of poems.
