Michel Faber (born 13 April 1960) is a Dutch-born writer of English-language. Born in the Netherlands, went to Australia, then with his second wife moved to Scotland. He has written great quality novels (among which Some Rain Must Fall, issued in 1998, Under the Skin (2000), to get to the latest ones The Fahrenheit Twins in 2005, The Book of Strange New Things, in 2014.
Faber’s second wife Eva died of cancer in July 2014. He published a poetry collection, Undying, about this event in 2016 to honour her memory. Bright, tragic, candid and true, these poems are an exceptional chronicle of what it means to find the love of your life, and what it is like to have to say goodbye and how to chart this grief through poetry.
“Somehow the challenge of caring for her did something to my chemistry. I think it made new pathways form in the brain”
The poems chart the ravages of her illness and treatment, the intimacies of caring for her, the awful practicalities and the emotional abyss of a funeral and its aftermath.
Sandro Pecchiari
F.W Paine Ltd. Bryson House, Horace Road. Kingston
This is the way it is:
we’ll spend the night apart.
I have your new address
on a printed card
but I don’t know this city well enough
to picture where you’re sleeping.
Besides, it’s over now.
I’m surplus to requirements
You are with others of your kind
and I, at last, am absent from your mind.
There are so many people I should tell
that you have left me.
A challenge for another day.
How warm it is! It has become July.
I look up as I walk, and in the sky
I see the first of all the moons
we will not share.
