Changes

|title=The Professor of Poetry

|sort=Professor of Poetry, The

|publisher=Sceptre

|date=July 2013

|website=http://www.gracemccleen.com/gracemccleen/_HOMEPAGE.html

|summary=Steeped in poet references and research, Prof Stone attempts to write the great academic masterpiece her Oxford professor predicted and re-kindles her strange relationship with her mentor. More intellectual than [[The Land of Decoration by Grace McCleen|The Land of Decoration]] and less haunting but particularly if you enjoy the study of poetry, this will appeal.

}}

Grace McCleen's ''The Professor of Poetry'' is Elizabeth Stone, a 52 year old aged professor at a London University. When the book opens she has just discovered that a cancer scare is now in remission, but forced by her illness to take a sabbatical, she sets about researching her latest book based on some papers of TS Eliot. This takes her back to Oxford, to her alma mater and raises the prospect of seeing her former professor there, a man convinced of the young Miss Stone's potential at an early age, but whose last meeting was somewhat awkward. McCleen looks at the issues raised by generations of poets, namely time, death and love. For Professor Stone, the first has passed, the second come uncomfortably close and the third remains unknown to her. What's more, her academic focus is on the music of love poetry which is somewhat ironic in that she avoids human relationships perhaps due to the death of her mother at an early age and an unhappy foster experience, while also having a peculiar aversion to music. Perhaps though this is what allows her a detached ability to write academic studies.