Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 138
- Language: English
- Date Published: December, 2017
- ISBN: 978-1-939929-98-3
Praise
Essay Poems is Donald Wellman’s most ambitious volume of poetry to date. The verses absorb everything including several languages besides English (Spanish, Latin, German, French). His poetry evokes the universe seen from the all-encompassing point of view of Borges’ Aleph. The center slips away. There is no sense of personal identity. But someone emerges, with a liquid body. Information, quotations agglomerate and turn around in a dancing vortex propelled by a horror vacui. Allusions dart in every direction as the richness of the text overwhelms the reader. —Roberto Echavarren
Wellman is a wanderer, a wonderer, and well of knowledge, too. Probing, disturbing, disorienting, and melancholic, these are erudite and emotional essay-poem-collages. They loop and spin the reader in multiple directions from the mucilaginous body to fishing with handline and hook, or searching for a whisk in a Chinese store, a storm of stars, the throes of love, the self is felt, reflected, distorted, and imagined. —Ros Zimmermann
These serial poems point the reader toward unexpected affinities between text and text, event and consequence, thought and being. Wellman’s enormous erudition penetrates into the essence of what matters in life and in the life of the mind. In the hands of a lesser poet, such an ambitious sweep would be doomed to fail: Wellman triumphs. —Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno
Wellman’s methodical chora, offering a unique philosophical-spiritual and literary approach, is a marvelously intelligent translation “of false / and fictionalized confessions,” beautifully wrought and suffused with a rueful gaiety that will break your heart. “A passageway to a parallel world,” everything one might fear and desire: dick, Zyklon B, resemblances, contiguities, and causations “between thought and prayer” can be found herein, one of the most compelling books you will ever read. —Andrew Levy
A finely crafted, bawdy, beautiful, heartrending and hilarious testament to the poetic vocation. Who would have suspected that the dick–not the Lacanian phallus but the humble dick, pink and shriveled, “wrapped in folds of uncertainty,” that “moldy wad… wound with red rubber bands”–could be the anchoring point of an elegiac mode? Only a poet of Wellman’s craft and erudition, that ring in every phrase and every line. —Bill Lavender
Author
Donald Wellman is a poet and translator. He has translated books of poetry by Antonio Gamoneda, Emilio Prados, Yvan Goll, and Roberto Echavarren. Albiach / Celan: Reading Across Languages is from Annex Press (Spring 2017). His Expressivity in Modern Poetry is forthcoming from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. His poetry has been described as trans-cultural and baroque. His collections of poetry include Roman Exercises (Talisman House, 2015), The Cranberry Island Series (Dos Madres, 2013), A North Atlantic Wall (Dos Madres, 2010), Prolog Pages (Ahadada, 2009), and Fields (Light and Dust, 1995). As editor of O.ARS, he produced a series of annual anthologies including Coherence (1981) and Translations: Experiments in Reading (1984).
