De La Salle University Publishing House (DLSUPH)
FOR THE TEMPUS-FUGITIVES: POEMS AND VERSE-ESSAYS
by: Christopher Norris
Published and distributed by
De La Salle University (DLSU) Publishing House, 2017
ISBN 978-971-555-644-6
POETRY/PHILOSOPHY
In this latest collection of poems and verse-essays Christopher Norris revisits many of the topics for which he is best-known as a philosopher, literary theorist, and writer on music. Among them are the many-worlds metaphysics of Leibniz, the nature of subjective time-experience, the issue of poetic truth, the function of rhyme in poetry, the “theory wars” in literary studies, the augmented-fourth interval (or tritone), also known as the “devil in music,” and musical minimalism approached from a critical or cultural-diagnostic standpoint. There are also some shorter, more “occasional” pieces including an epithalamion (wedding-poem) for the poet’s daughter, a semi-fictive double-sestina about police infiltration of activist groups, a savagely bawdy polemic imagined as addressed by the ancient Greek satirist Archilochus to his ex-fiancée Neobule, and a number of shrewdly angled political poems with reference to events from the 1980s to the present.
These pieces all have the hallmark qualities of intellectual range, perceptive wit, and formal inventiveness that characterize Norris’s recent turn toward the verse-essay. Taken together they make a strong case for poetry not so much as a means of first-person lyrical utterance but rather as a vehicle for argument, dialogue, and open debate.
“This stunningly accomplished volume, which handles the most demanding verse forms with apparently effortless skill, confirms Christopher Norris’s status as one of the most erudite, original and adventurous English-language poets of our time.”
TERRY EAGLETON, Distinguished Professor of English Literature, University of Lancaster
“’Let’s think,’ writes Christopher Norris, ‘let’s think’ in verse, highly formalised verse. And let us, he writes, after Kant, ‘dare to know’―to know, again in verse, highly formalised verse. And ‘let us,’ he writes, ‘know ourselves more fully.’ And we do. Here. Astonishing.”
JOHN SCHAD, Professor of Modern Literature, University of Lancaster
CHRISTOPHER NORRIS is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff in Wales where he previously taught English Literature, having moved from one to the other discipline via literary theory. He is the author or editor of more than forty books on topics in philosophy, literary theory, music, and the history of ideas, among them―most recently―Deconstruction After All, Philosophy Outside-In, and Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative. His first collection of poems, The Cardinal’s Dog, was published by the De La Salle University Publishing House in Manila and the Seventh Quarry Press in Swansea, Wales.