Soul and Substance: A Poet’s Examination Papers

These impenetrable reflections by poet Wright (Thirteen Quintets for Lois) meditate on the nature of death, language, knowledge, and the self. Through brief, elliptical dispatches, he interrogates the relationships between the physical and metaphysical, consciousness and life, and the self and its environs. In “On Death,” Wright takes the hypothetical deaths of a tree and a neighbor as the impetus for an abstruse investigation of how the living think about death, but the inquiry is dragged down by an abundance of questions that the author makes little effort to answer: “What can we possibly mean by negotiation with regard to life and death?”; “What in the world can it mean to speak of death as a state we can use?” Every entry is muddled by jargon that obscures even the most basic points of Wright’s arguments, as when he contends in his incomprehensible essay on rhythm that “we must slip away from that soul that proposes Logoi as noetic completeness, and avoid all quarrel with immediacy.” Other entries touch on archetypes, mathematics, philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe, and physicist Peter Galison, but Wright neglects to explain these disparate references, and they don’t cohere into an intelligible whole. At times bordering on nonsensical, this doesn’t live up to the poet’s estimable reputation. (June)