either, Orpheus

Dan Disney

PRAISE FOR EITHER, ORPHEUS 

Dan Disney's highly original either, Orpheus remakes the villanelle. Rainer Maria Rilke and Søren Kierkegaard are the presiding spirits in the volume, and Disney is also in discussion about divergent ways of seeing and understanding, with writers from all over the globe. This inventive poetry explores culture, authenticity and translation, and quizzes the lyric modes of apostrophe and song.

PAUL HETHERINGTON

Dan Disney's either, Orpheus arrives with the force of a tropical weather event to deliver a series of pulsating shocks to the languages of everyday life. Neither strictly poetic nor purely philosophical, these deliriously pedagogical poems summon Rilke, Levertov, Ashbery, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Cage and multitudinous others to reconsider what we thought we knew of authorship, form, religion, phenomenology, and love. For Disney, the proper response to Bloom's anxiety of influence is 'a godless both/and' in which a series of 'elegiac anthroposcenes' transforms the labyrinth of solitude into the kinds of worlds that 'non-residents' might want to inhabit. Hospitable, demanding, festive and fearless, either, Orpheus passes through where previously it was not evident that anyone could find a passage.

FIONA HILE

The forms, their content, and the interpretations of source texts emphasize a condemnation of 'habitat and ritual', of 'old aristocracies of thought'. The collection as a whole accomplishes this by, as the individual villanelle, returning time and again to its singular obsession: the spiritual void of any machinery and the role of the 'poet-mystic' in drawing substance out of nothing.

ZACH LINGE

Book details

PUBLICATION DATE: March 2016
FORMAT: Paperback
EXTENT: 90 pages
SIZE: C-format, 234 x 153mm
ISBN: 9781742588193
RIGHTS: World
CATEGORY: Dan Disney, Poetry,