Cark

A collection of poems with critical preface. The author expresses concern for responsibilities and obligations resulting from utterance and offers a means of reading poetry in light of such concerns. Lyric theory and the legacy of Language poetry with regards to the lyric are loci in a discussion of contemporary poetics. It analyzes the work of poets Tomaz Salamun and Lyn Hejinian, in relation to theorists Theodor Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to articulate a poetics specific to the poems in the collection. The poetics is described via the literary and anthropological uses of metaphor, which are employed to unify text, writer, and reader. The phenomenology of ritual and ritual theory address these contingents to conclude the preface. The collection of poems is divided into three sections, each a distinct, interrelated collection of poetic modes.