Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2024
And deeper still than this, my eyes penetrate
far into the earth as if it was an agate:
foundations, dungeons, subterranean cities
where thwarted joyance wages its atrocities...
(from 'Dusk: An Antique Song')
Ned
Denny's startling new collection recalls what Heidegger says – in his
essay on Hölderlin – about the poet, of all mortals, reaching most
deeply into the abyss. In what does this abyss, the "world's night,"
consist? In the fact that the gods have departed, and in the rootless,
heaven-proof and now worldwide technocracy forged in their absence. Yet
the poet is also the one who sees, in that night, the lost gods' traces,
and there are glimpses here "through a veil of names" of nature's
saving radiance, of the indestructible delicacy of Claude's last
landscape, of a "wild grin of insect glee" just beyond the confines of
sleep. As Denny's adept voice 'throws' itself into and through other
texts, forms, places, things and times – including works by Heine,
classical Chinese poets, Pindar, Ronsard, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Victor
Hugo and Lorca – it becomes clear that the fathoming of our iron age is
inseparable from the coming dawn.
- ISBN13 9781800173316
- Publish Date 27 July 2023
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 96
- Language English