patricides

This is poetry at the margins, even beyond the margins an extraordinary debut. Intense and compact certainly, but takin pains to follow Oppen’s dictum “I have not and never did have any motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity”. Shades hover around these margins: Oppen of course, Celan, Blanchot, Mallarmé, Neruda. Here is poetry influenced by modern European thought and fuelled with ontological insights. The result is a series of intimate meditations on the intrinsic failure at the heart of creative writing denying the source which fathers it. It ends with a profound series on the death of his own father and of all fathers. This is poetry pared pared down to its essential core but still lyrical and obsessed with the music of language.