Big Snow

Big Snow, a novel by David Park, asks what it means to be a poet's wife: his muse and lover, present for both the heights of inspiration and the ordinary days, and often left with the drudgery of supporting "the great man." Park explores this complicated role through three women.

Two of them are based on real people. Catherine Blake was the wife of William Blake, the 19th-century poet, painter and engraver. Nadezhda Mandelstam was the wife of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in a transit camp on the way to Siberia during Stalin's rule. The third is invented, the wife of a contemporary poet, who looks back on her husband's life in the days just after his death.

All three women live with their husbands' fame or notoriety. Each stays loyal to the man she married and takes seriously the task of helping with his work and preserving it, despite infidelities and other hardships.