I first became interested in the poet John Donne when I noticed that the playwright Derek Jarman had his poem ‘The Sun Rising’ inscribed on his singular home Prospect Cottage:
Still, Donne’s poetry is notoriously hard to understand fully.
‘Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne’ by Katherine Rundell takes this difficult subject (both the man and his writing), and unravels the mysteries of both in a biography that is at once erudite and a page turning read.
Following no more than a trail of biographical crumbs, Rundell somehow produces a feast – rich, humorous and poignant – helped immensely by a wonderfully dramatic reading by Jamie Parker on the Audible edition.
A great biography, and this is a really great biography, leads us through the life of a man so that the times illumine the man and the man illuminates his times…and so, Rundell includes many fascinating details of early 17th century London. For example, the improbable ‘frost fairs’, that turned the Thames into an icy carnival of life and colour…
