D.M.Thomas, author of the iconic novel The White Hotel, has turned his creative imagination to a genre that has been curiously neglected for over a hundred years, the verse novel. Vintage Ghosts, often hilarious and sometimes sad, always with brilliant poetic technique, explores the changing relationships of a wide variety of (mostly) old men who write to the forum of a new website called ‘Vintage Archive’. The men are united by a sense of loss, brought about by the liberation of women, which for them is like the end of the British Empire.
One of Freud’s female colleagues observed that men, less anchored in reality than women, can make fetishes ‘of unimaginable splendour’ out of very little. For these old men, the lost splendour was the stockings-and-suspenders of their youth. The changes in women’s dress towards a more unisex look leaves them bewildered and angry. But there are a few women, including a colonel’s widow, a Russian-Armenian violinist, and an elderly ex-model, who seem to offer consolation…
D.M. Thomas is a poet and novelist. He was awarded the Los Angeles Times Fiction prize for his novel The White Hotel, which has been translated into 30 languages; a Cholmondeley award for poetry; and the Orwell Prize for his biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His translations of Russian poetry have been highly praised.
About The Contributors
- D.M.Thomas, author of the iconic, bestselling novel The White Hotel, is also a distinguished poet, winner of a Cholmondeley award for poetry and the Orwell prize for his biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.A fifty minute selection of his poetry, including poems from his two previous collections with Francis Boutle (Flight and Smoke and Two Countries), read by himself, can be downloaded from the Poetry Archive at poetryarchive.org www.dmthomasonline.net
- Tim Roberts is a late-flowering, modernist painter and printmaker who lives in North London. timroberts.eu
