Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. Written over the course of two decades, THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND EYES was begun as an homage to Scheherazade, the heroine of The Arabian Nights who, through her nightly tale-telling, saved her culture and her own life by teaching a powerful and murderous ruler to abandon cruelty in favor of wisdom and benevolence. Hejinian's book is a compendium of "night works"—lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day's end some of the day's events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND EYES argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life.
Review
"For Lyn Hejinian the concept "everything" or "everything living" is the greatest seduction. In this book of tales, poems, polemics, lullabies, treatises, asides (the behavior of birds, the behavior of ghosts; the dramas of capital, species, percipient individual), "everything" is captive to life and continuation is queen. Like Scheherazade's ploy, to which it more than nods, The Book of a Thousand Eyes spins out scene after moral after speculation merely for the payoff one wakes to dailythe privilege of beginning again. "Nothing has been proved," of course, but the combined exhilaration and outrage of what experience means in the language of the twenty-first century is robustly nailed in this book. "Sleep," Hejinian says, "can't put interpretation to rest"far from it; regardless of which consciousness these antic and anti-summary works probe, they propose the very opposite of rest. Hejinian's sallies are at once pragmatic, mysterious, and an utter delight to read." Jean Day, author, The I and the You
Synopsis
Written over the course of two decades, The Book of a Thousand Eyes was begun as an homage to Scheherazade, the heroine of The Arabian Nights who, through her nightly tale-telling, saved her culture and her own life by teaching a powerful and murderous ruler to abandon cruelty in favor of wisdom and benevolence. Hejinian s book is a compendium of night works lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day s end some of the day s events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise The Book of a Thousand Eyes argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life."
About the Author
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her groundbreaking book of poetry, MY LIFE, published by Sun and Moon/Green Integer, has had five reprintings from 1980-2002. Her most recent books include A BORDER COMEDY (Granary Books, 2001), SLOWLY and THE BEGINNER (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), THE FATALIST (Omnidawn, 2003), SAGA/CIRCUS (Omnidawn, 2008), and THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND EYES (Omnidawn, 2012). The University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. In the spring of 2007, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.