The great wheel

the long version

Kinnear charts the map from Herakleitos to Pound, Freud to Derrida, Celan, Rilke, Joyce. This is a text like no other, divining the naming and un-naming of things from zero through infinity in the way of the philosopher-poets. Alternating contemplations on immensities with crystalline poems that begin each chapter, spoked with Kinnear's translations of Heraclitus, and spun with the dreams of memory, this is a book to reach for again and again. We journey through memory/dream, chance/love, sleep/death, reason/no-reason, meaning/unmeaning, Khora at the gates of the unsayable, 'vast as the cosmos she can contain.' This book is not so much a statement about where poetry comes from as it is an inside-view of poetry becoming itself, happening now, unfolding on the page before us.