Description
Book SynopsisIn this latest collection of poems and verse-essays, Christopher Norris revisits many of the topics for which he is best known as a philosopher, literary theorist, and writer on music. Among them are the many-worlds metaphysics of Leibniz, the nature of subjective time-experience, the issue of poetic truth, the function of rhyme in poetry, the theory wars in literary studies, the augmented-fourth interval (or tritone), also known as the devil in music, and musical minimalism approached from a critical or cultural-diagnostic standpoint. There are also some shorter, more occasional pieces including an epithalamion (wedding-poem) for the poet's daughter, a semi-fictive double sestina about police infiltration of activist groups, a savagely bawdy polemic imagined as addressed by the ancient Greek satirist Archilochus to his ex-fiancee Neobule, and a number of shrewdly angled political poems with reference to events from the 1980s to the present. These pieces have the hallmark qualities of intellectual range, perceptive wit, and formal inventiveness that characterise Norris's verse-essays. They make a strong case for poetry as a vehicle for argument, dialogue, and open debate.
Trade ReviewThis stunningly accomplished volume, which handles the most demanding verse forms with apparently effortless skill, confirms Christopher Norriss status as one of the most erudite, original and adventurous English-language poets of our time. -- Terry Eagleton, Distinguished Professor of English Literature, University of Lancaster
Let's think, writes Christopher Norris, let's think in verse, highly formalised verse. And let us, he writes, after Kant, dare to know to know, again in verse, highly formalised verse. And let us, he writes, know ourselves more fully. And we do. Here. Astonishing. -- John Schad, Professor of Modern Literature, University of Lancaster
