Soul and Substance
A Poet's Examination Papers
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- £20.99
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- £20.99
Publisher Description
A collection of new and startlingly original essays from an acclaimed poet, essayist, and playwright
Jay Wright is widely recognized as one of the most important American poets of the past half century. But in recent years, he has also written a series of unconventional essays that he calls “examination papers,” which he defines as “designated inquiries to myself.” In these linked essays, most of which resemble prose-poems, with only a few lines set on each page, Wright explores abiding artistic and philosophical concerns, including language, aesthetic form, knowledge, time, and death. Soul and Substance presents these pieces for the first time.
Drawing on everything from African mythology to mathematical axioms, Wright reflects on a wide range of topics: the difficulties of defining and confronting death; the challenge of transcending one’s own consciousness; the nature of rhythm and the structure of space; and the relationship among the self, the body, and the material world. Throughout, the book examines the limits of human knowledge and the implications of our always imperfect understanding.
Experimental and original, Soul and Substance is an important addition to the work of a major writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These impenetrable reflections by poet Wright (Thirteen Quintets for Lois) meditate on the nature of death, language, knowledge, and the self. Through brief, elliptical dispatches, he interrogates the relationships between the physical and metaphysical, consciousness and life, and the self and its environs. In "On Death," Wright takes the hypothetical deaths of a tree and a neighbor as the impetus for an abstruse investigation of how the living think about death, but the inquiry is dragged down by an abundance of questions that the author makes little effort to answer: "What can we possibly mean by negotiation with regard to life and death?"; "What in the world can it mean to speak of death as a state we can use?" Every entry is muddled by jargon that obscures even the most basic points of Wright's arguments, as when he contends in his incomprehensible essay on rhythm that "we must slip away from that soul that proposes Logoi as noetic completeness, and avoid all quarrel with immediacy." Other entries touch on archetypes, mathematics, philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe, and physicist Peter Galison, but Wright neglects to explain these disparate references, and they don't cohere into an intelligible whole. At times bordering on nonsensical, this doesn't live up to the poet's estimable reputation.
