'I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me - or else that I didn't live much longer!' "Clarity or Death!" takes its title from this letter of Wittgenstein's. That desire for clarity in our knowledge of the world, the universe and ourselves is the linking preoccupation of Jeffrey Wainwright's collection. Five poems develop the physicist Richard Feynman's proposition that through scientific study 'we may be able to reduce the number of different things'. Others ponder infinity and number. These poems are both playful and intellectually rigorous, exploring not only ideas but the experience of having and articulating them. They play alongside other aspects of personal experience. Central to Wainwright's writing is a fascination with what Wallace Stevens called 'the uncertain light of single, certain truth', an uncertain light embodied in the sensuousness of language given poetic form.
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11 | (10) |
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We may be able to reduce the number of different things, i-v |
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12 | (5) |
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The Visible universe can only be of the kind that permits us |
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17 | (1) |
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the starting state of the universe must have been very highly ordered |
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18 | (1) |
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the universe is like a pool that has had a stone thrown into it |
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19 | (1) |
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all the ordered forms of energy in the universe would ultimately find themselves degraded |
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20 | (1) |
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21 | (12) |
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there may be symmetrical universes but they are not ours |
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22 | (1) |
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a point is never alone, i-iv |
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23 | (4) |
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by categories do we maister [ master] the world |
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27 | (1) |
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28 | (1) |
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29 | (1) |
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against those who refuse definitions |
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30 | (1) |
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What need we know of the workings of Nature in Order to appreciate how consciousness may be a part of it? |
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31 | (1) |
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faith in reason is the trust that the ultimate natures of things lie together in a harmony which excludes mere arbitrariness |
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32 | (1) |
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The abstraction of number is beautiful |
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33 | (6) |
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...and with the Indian figures 987654321 and zephira all calculations are democratically possible, i-iii |
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34 | (3) |
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the wall that separates the living from one another is no less opaque than the wall that separates the living from the dead |
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37 | (2) |
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39 | (44) |
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call death an observation, i-iii |
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83 | (4) |
| Acknowledgements |
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87 | (1) |
| Notes |
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87 | |
Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1944. He was educated at the University of Leeds and has taught at the University of Wales, in New York, and currently at the Manchester Metropolitan University. He has translated French drama for the Royal Shakespeare Company and BBC Radio and is a theatre critic for the Independent. He is the author of Heart's Desire (1978), Selected Poems (1985), The Red-Headed Pupil (1994) and Out of the Air (1999), all published by Carcanet.
