Synopses & Reviews
In Regions of Unlikeness Thomas Gardner explores the ways a number of quite different twentieth-century American poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Jorie Graham, and Michael Palmer, frame their work as taking place within, and being brought to life by, an acknowledgment of the limits of language. Gardner approaches their poetry in light of philosopher Stanley Cavells remarkably similar engagement with the issues of skepticism and linguistic finitude. The skeptics refusal to settle for anything less than perfect knowledge of the world, Cavell maintains, amounts to a refusal to accept the fact of human finitude. Gardner argues that both Cavell and the poets he discusses reject skepticisms world-erasing conclusions but nonetheless honor the truth about the limits of knowledge that skepticism keeps alive. In calling attention to the limits of such acts as describing or remembering, the poets Gardner examines attempt to renew language by teasing a charged drama out of their inability to grasp with certainty. Juxtaposed with Gardners readings of the work of the younger poets are his interviews with them. In many ways, these conversations are at the core of Gardners book, demonstrating the wide-ranging implications of the struggles and mappings enacted in the poems. The interviews are themselves examples of the charged intimacy Gardner deals with in his readings.
Review
“I admire this work very much. . . . The inclusion of interviews with three of the selected poets strikes me as a brilliant stroke of judgment. . . . The poets become their own best spokespersons, and the book becomes a kind of critical collaboration, or . . . a ‘conversation in which critic and poet give the reader access to the very processes by which intuition becomes knowledge.”—Willard Spiegelman, author of Majestic Indolence: English Romantic Poetry and the Work of Art Willard Spiegelman
Review
"By bringing [Stanley] Cavell's ideas to bear on contemporary poetry, Gardner all but guarantees Regions of Unlikeness an interested audience; indeed, the premise is brilliant."—Boston Review Boston Review
Review
"Gardner provides an interesting and informative appreciation of five poets: Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Robert Hass, Jorie Graham, and Michael Palmer. . . . Central to the book are extensive interviews with Hass, Graham, and Palmer. . . . Gardner is at his best when discussing Jorie Graham's work, which he sees as incandescent. Includes detailed notes and selected works cited. For large undergraduate and graduate poetry collections."—Choice Choice
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [307]-308) and index.
About the Author
Thomas Gardner, a professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, is the author of
Discovering Ourselves in Whitman: The Contemporary American Long Poem and
The Mime, Speaking, a book of poetry.