Year of the Poets

 It’s the bicentennial year of 1976 at the Davenport Summer Retreat for Artists, and fifty-nine year old Arthur Honeyman — lothario, vagabond, carpenter and, above all, renowned versifier — has his hands full: carrying on simultaneous affairs with two poetesses, composing his first new manuscript of poems in years, and vacillating between making contact with his estranged adult son, Pablo, or just letting him be.

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Along the way, Honeyman’s conviction that there are two kinds of people—“those who hold onto things, and those who get on with things”—will be put to the test, and he’ll finally have to decide which kind of person he wants to be.

 "In Ballard’s highly readable, character-driven debut novel, the summer of 1976 proves messy, seductive and life-changing for celebrated poet, wanderer and serial womanizer Arthur Honeyman and all who enter his orbit."

—Kirkus Review