Customer Reviews

In the Name of the Neither

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

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.