ever the loyal wife, never the poet's muse.

THE POETS' WIVES David Park Bloomsbury €16.99 ???? David Park is a novelist who has always stood slightly apart from his contemporaries. His sparse, lyrical and yet clear-headed prose leaves no room for false notes, nostalgia or self-serving mythologies. One of the quiet men of Irish writing, he also possesses one of its truest voices and has built up a deeply impressive oeuvre without fuss or pyrotechnics. His new novel is a departure in structure and location. While most of his previous work was set in his native Northern Ireland, the highly unusual (and affecting) triptych of women's lives conjured up in The Poets' Wives are set in different centuries and very different countries. It is the story of three women, united by one fact: they are the partners of poets whose lives were played out in the public gaze. In each case there is a third party in their marriage. To call this third party 'the muse' would be too fanciful for a writer as grounded as Park. But this intrusive third party is the public verse their husbands sculpt from the private intimacies of their lives. These poems bring joy and hurt in equal measure, and - in one case - cause enormous personal hardship. Two wives are historical figures: the third is fictitious. The longest section (and perhaps Park's finest piece of work) explores the remarkable life of Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. His poems were already suspect to the Soviet authorities in 1933 before he risked reading a poem mocking Stalin to a handful of friends. It was an act of creative honesty and political suicide in a Moscow plagued by informers. Not only did Nadezhda stay with him after the horror of his arrest and torture, she followed him into exile, enduring starvation and persecution until he was taken from her to die in a gulag. In one of the great acts in 20th-century literature, she kept his poems alive by perpetually reciting them to herself, during decades of deprivation until she outlived Stalin and, in old age, could finally risk writing down the great body of work that the Kremlin had wished to erase from history. Park's tour-deforce exploration of her life is preceded by an account of the life of Catherine Blake - wife of William - who endured a different torment of daily life with a brilliant but volatile and unworldly visionary who was mocked as insane. Park's final wife is married to a fictitious Northern Ireland poet. While Nadezhda kept Osip alive with scraps of food, this wife has kept her husband in comfort by working for the health service while he basked in public glory and contributed nothing to raising their children beyond scorn. The unpublished love poems she finds after his death are to another woman. Yet she too - in her quiet way - remains faithful to the integrity of such hurtful poems, recognising how their quality supersedes his selfishness. The details in this closing section are debatably mundane and equally infused with the depth of character and emotion that are hallmarks of his work as a novelist of enormous sensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]