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“To open these pages is to find that ‘contemporary’ is a word deserving of more attention, and more exact attention, than we have yet given it. We hear in the music of Corless-Smith’s language the long lyric history of English verse. He is as adept in the conceits of metaphysical poetry as he is in the tones and tunes of seventeenth-century verse; the strings upon which he strums are held taut by centuries. Name his lyre: Tradition.”—Dan Beachy-Quick, www.jacketmagazine.com
Nota is part travelogue and part philosophical examination. Corless-Smith here makes a compendium: layers of reference, of history, of text over text over text. Invented and real figures watch over a Self who admits to a history beyond the moment of simple consumption. The setting is an England in its Golden Age, a homesick construction to be consumed, with pleasure, in the discomfiting knowledge of its artificiality.
Endorsements:
“Dear reader, take care of this book. It’s important and amazing- a vast conversation and meditation- an investigation into the “stupend symptom” of the self in poetry and writing. ‘ I AM NO FREE AGENCY,’ the text tells us: ‘terror for myself and those dear’; ‘stiff vein into a nether heart.’ The language of this book changes musically from the 17th century to the contemporary; the punctuation and grammar shift necessarily and curiously. Lyric quatrains appear and reappear, suggesting a long poem struggling for completion. Sorrow and brightness fall among the words. A search for the self here undertakes the discovery of itself in our own time, when political, social, and religious gridirons no longer hold on to us. We are disjunctives: ‘My story is as everyone’s/ though for that seldom heard.’ Among the many quotations within the conversations of this book, I think the courage of it is especially indebted to the meditations of Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, placed, so to speak, alongside Wittgenstein’s linguistic edge. Urne Buriall: ‘But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy.’” —Robin Blaser
From the Book:
The Bee
From beds and borders bordering external waste
Our delving truth nods into everyness
Plain truth inticing as a spic'd perfume
To paint the desert a lush wilderness
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MARTIN CORLESS-SMITH was born and raised in Worcestershire, England. He has studied both painting and poetry, at the University of Reading, England, Southern Methodist University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Utah. His books include Of Piscator (University of Georgia Press) and Complete Travels (West House Books, England). He lives and teaches in Boise, Idaho, and spends summers in England, with his wife, the poet Catherine Wagner, and their son, Ambrose.
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