In the Name of the Neither [Paperback]

Gustaf Sobin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2002

Poetry. "Sobin's poetry grants us a clarity of vision but most of all it grants the capacity for silence and for hearing in silent stillness the infinite possibility of generation and renewal"--Robert Baker, American Book Review. "Sobin's work enacts vocal gestures that take their bearing from the breath itself, intuiting their way, as `air rushing through air,' back to some originary grammar, long since fragmented almost past recognition"--Andrew Zawacki, Boston Review of Books. "Sobin has always been a supreme poetic stylist. His rhythms contain remarkable subtlety, and his use of the syllable as the basic unit of sound may be more precise than any contemporary poet"--Mark Wallace, Verse.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Sobin has always been a supreme poetic stylist. -- Verse

The expatriate American poet Gustaf Sobin is a national treasure. -- Raintaxi

[Sobin`s poetry] grants the capacity for silence and for hearing in silent stillness the infinite possibility of generation and renewal. -- American Book Review

From the Publisher

Gustaf Sobin is one of the foremost poets and novelists of his generation. A native of Boston and graduate of Brown University, he has lived in France for the past forty years. His poetry, including celebrated books such as Voyaging Portraits (New Directions, 1988) and By The Bias Of Sound (Talisman, 1995), is unequalled in the avant-garde. His fiction, notably The Fly- Truffler(1999), has been internationally acclaimed and widely translated.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Talisman House; 1st Ed. edition (May 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584980303
• ISBN-13: 978-1584980308
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,684,497 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Establishes Gustaf Sobin as a master of worded thought, September 9, 2002

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In the Name of the Neither (Paperback)

In The Name Of The Neither is a compendium of poetry that clearly establishes Gustaf Sobin as a master of worded thought and structural presentation that cannot fail to elicit a response within the heart and mind of his readers. Libretto: hardens to the spill of/so much soft/ambivalent breath. fits twisted about each successive ex-/halation. aren't we, in fact, for working our-selves out-ward,/sipping one another into the utterly un-//differentiated? knot and/tug, pull and/slip, aren't these the tiny, augmentative gestures we'd drawn/from that illegible libretto? for here, where the//room, the/very walls have lost all/substantiality, the mirrors in/swelling blossom. blossom vacuous. yes, here, as our mouths//break open, and our lashes/clamp shut against that very acceleration, we, at/last, massed, culminant, might arch and, in/arching, un-/happen

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A very mixed response, June 29, 2002

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Name of the Neither (Paperback)

Sobin is an excellent poet, a poets' poet rather than a people's poet. His form exudes incredible control of language at its most basic element - syllable (not phoneme if that is what you anticipated). His poems encourage, even require, multiple readings - to savor the sound, the untwine the meaning. His language is comparatively complex, using unusual words to build his layered meaning. Many of the poems explore words, non-existence, ... Here and there he reminded me of a reverse Jabes - concerned with the present rather than the absent, despite Sobin's concern with non-existent.

Examples: "... scriptless wastes, there / where the parched lips, irremediable, had/ gone un-/lettered ..." or "the resuscitation of so many surppressed ur-words by the bias of a yet-to-be articulated grammar."

So why have I given the book a mere three stars? Some of the poems are excellent but others have perfectly controlled forms but with meaning either too difficult to tease out or apparently unclear in the mind of the poet. These poems sometimes come across as intellectual pride ... that to me is a fatal flaw in poetry.