In Search of the Great Dead

With grim humor and humorous grimness, In Search of the Great Dead engages the great themes of poetry: death and fame.

The title poem of this collection records Richard Cecil's quest for the tombs of the famous dead. At first the search leads him on a tour of famous European tombstones—the grave of Chateaubriand in St. Malo, the shared tomb of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, Yeats's old Celtic cross in Sligo—but gradually it expands into areas where...