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| Winner of the 2006 Nightboat Poetry Prize |
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Jonathan Weinert’s award-winning collection, In the Mode of Disappearance, transcends contemporary categories of traditional and experimental, existing in a mode in which the quality of thought itself is paramount. Like Wallace Stevens and William Blake, his is a poetry that reaches the summit of philosophy without being shorn of song. Throughout the collection, Weinert draws upon a range of classical and postmodern poetic strategies and structures, dexterously integrating them with a series of non-poetic modes and constructs (including the four cardinal directions, the 9 non-zero digits, the major arcana of the Tarot)—in a thoughtful and soulful effort to build a bulwark against the forces of fragmentation and disappearance. Weinert’s at once intimate and expansive poetics forges a continuum of human knowledge in which, as Edith Sitwell once wrote, “the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind” are one.
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"The formal intelligence of the collection is inspiringly complex, as is the moral and psychological engagement with the situations at hand. This moral complexity is expressed in personal and political dilemmas—both in fragmentary forms and in sweeping lyricism. The poet is careful with the heft of each word. “It’s only the small / mortal sentence / that survives us, spoken by / my lips directly / in your oceanic ear,” he writes in “Email in the Manner of Frank O’Hara.” The title itself, In the Mode of Disappearance, is a phrase that allows two nouns to engage the gears neither would have in isolation. . . .
"The poet employs diapason and smoke. He has reconciled himself to the haphazard nature of memory both rationally and irrationally. Individual poems sometimes use rhyme—both end-rhymes and embedded rhymes—yet reading the rhymed poems, I had the sensation that rhyming is this work is less about making sounds meet than it is about slicing across those meetings, calling up an internal violence—again, the figure of Urthona comes up—in a ways that traverse diagonally across safe and true zones in order to locate themselves in the workings of experience." |
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—from the foreword by Brenda Hillman |
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| Inventive as hell, within its own formal limitations and liberations, In the Mode of Disappearance is as thinking as it is feeling, and never solely linear. It charts the progression of the soul, fleeing and in constant flight, while confronting the known possibilities of new earth and after-earth. A contemporary, non cultish, spirituality fuels Weinert’s prosody, neo sermonish. And yes, the pages, hot with what Aimé Césaire calls Poetic Knowledge, almost glow. This is an amazing debut. The beginning of what happens after “the leaving”, not just “the healing,” has begun. |
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| Jonathan Weinert has more emotional and technical range than almost any contemporary poet I know of. These poems move easily between high formalism and experimentalism, always with wit, sonic inventivness and erudition. Finally, though, it is his human insight and lyrical subtlety that will make In the Mode of Disappearance one of the best poetry books to be published this year. Jonathan Weinert is a marvelous writer. |
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Available April 2008 from |
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