Additional information
Weight | .65 lbs |
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Dimensions | 5.8 × .2 × 8.8 in |
Dianoia continues this acclaimed poet’s investigations into language, culture, and the intersections of recent history, philosophy, and human possibility
$17.95
Weight | .65 lbs |
---|---|
Dimensions | 5.8 × .2 × 8.8 in |
In a multigenre approach, making use of poetry, prose and graphics, Heller articulates with precision and clarity the lyric/anti-lyric boundaries of contemporary life exploring the nature of violence, politics, art, and the literary imagination. Heller’s poetry, impelled by what he calls his “thought-prosody,” in its diction and cadences, its range of references and allusions, strives to create an intelligible aesthetic and ethical vision, which “gives more force to a human argument of the world.”
Michael Heller’s new book has the energy and urgency of a dialogue on all that most matters, a dialogue with himself, with the reader, with poets and artists (Oppen, Segalen, Basho, Beckmann, Picasso), with history and terror, with the world and its absence. Dianoia is a bristling and bracing book of unwavering attentiveness, apprehensive questioning, breathtaking clarity. It marks a further tuning of Heller’s rigorous music of thought.
“This is a ‘Jewish’ poem alright,” Michael Heller writes in the second poem of Dianoia, the most recent collection to be added to his books of poetry, now totalling more than twenty. It’s an assertion, yes, but one that is packed with doubt. On one level, it seems as though Heller is assuring himself because he’s not so sure—as if he might be searching for a genuinely Jewish poem amid stacks of his poems that are semi-Jewish, near-Jewish, or maybe not Jewish at all. But on another level, there’s also the sense of an artist standing at a distance from his art, thumb up and squinting at it to assess what kind of beast it truly is: “Hmm. Yes. This is a Jewish poem, alright.” Or is it?