Death Drive Through Gaia Paris (Open Spaces, 4) (Volume 4) - Softcover

Noble, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552382265 ISBN 13: 9781552382264

Publisher: University of Calgary Press, 2007

Synopsis

"Noble's work has always engaged, in its own way, with the Western Canadian tradition of poetry as intellectual experiment grounded on local experience.... Death Drive marks a counter-turn in the work of one of Southern Alberta's most distinctive writers." - Chris Jennings, Department of English, University of Ottawa In this collection of poetry, Charles Noble further reins in an already tight form - haiku - only to let loose a "logopoeic" poetry. He presents poems of extraordinary rigour and riddles of wit that are solved by "lifetime" insights - a dialectical poetry that still observes a phenomenological toehold but transcends the limits of locality in recognizing the curled-up-but-everywhere world of media and markets - à la Fredric Jameson. And yet, these "haikus" go straight - to "the shock of the naïve." They turn to a middle ground, in Aristotle's sense of difficult target. They point to human acts, human reactions, and enact, themselves, a meta-linguistic wrestling, at one with the quarreling couple in the bar hanging on each other's words and insistent with "what do you mean by [a simple word]?" But they are also implicated in what he calls the death drive (not death wish), which arcs freely over a human life span - think architecture - and which, more radically, in the "pleated/ crossword," "make[s]/ good// a/ bit/ of/ bad/ infinity," no expenses, save for that toehold, earth, as he would have it.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Noble was born in Lethbridge and was raised in Nobleford. He earned his BA in English and Philosophy from the University of Alberta and is the winner of the Writers' Guild of Alberta Poetry Award (1996). Charles now divides his time between Banff and Nobleford, where he farms with his brother, Brian, and his family.

Review:

"I can't, or at least I refrain from, putting my finger on what language/thought action is spurred into being by the seventeen-syllable constraint--the only hewed-to rule in these hybrid haikus. The intersection of the "imaginary" and the "symbolic" is obviously the central consideration here, referring to the haiku genre level--not to the omnipresent intertwining, however hidden, in any language action, even of course in strict (haiku) phanopeoic language, and which can always be teased out again and explored or experimented with in many directions and to extreme degrees, even to, in reverse, cutting it all back to melopoeia, to one of the "materialitƯies¨" of language, all of it to a pharmakon moment of apoetics uncannily taken up by re-cognized/re-cognizing literary process and thereby stutter-doubled into proto-genre, set off (a mobius and deist-like pun) by on-board musings as twined and twinned to overboard."

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1552382265
• ISBN 13: 9781552382264
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80