Thursday 28 February 2013

Is Matthew Tierney's New Book Any Good?


Phoebe Wang thinks so:
There is a truly exuberant pleasure in language expressed in metaphors such as “tumbleweeds of O2,” “counterfactuals pile up like cornflakes pile up/like models of megamolecules” and “galaxies fanning out like patches of demin.” Tierney finds time, space, matter, particles and the processes that form life on Earth endlessly diverting and chaotic. He, or his poet-persona, would be the ideal party guest, someone who could explain different kinds of infinity over a few pilsners in a way that you’d be sure to remember.
Kevin Kvas disagrees:
When all is said and done—when all is Googled and parsed—the poems are simply more masterfully sententious lyrics (sentimental individualism propagandized) with enough basic stuff about physics, math, and philosophy mixed in competently now and then for the book to benefit from the science-in-poetry bandwagon that’s been created by a few actually innovative experiments with science and math in poetry.

1 comment:

SG said...

Thanks for posting this!

The conversation about Probably Inevitable is continuing over here:

http://town-crier.ca/reviews/workshop-poetry-spectre-and-spectacle/