Jon Clay - Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze: Transformative Intensities

John Hall:

With wonderfully patient intelligence, and without ever succumbing to polemic, Jon Clay puts to work the lexicon of Deleuze (and Guattari) on a question that has haunted modernist poetics: what is it that poems do when you read them, especially when they are “difficult”? Very carefully, he sets out the terms and, just as carefully, he demonstrates their practicality through reading poems, many of them “recalcitrant”, by contemporary UK-based poets, including Andrea Brady, the late Douglas Oliver, J.H. Prynne and Denise Riley. His close readings confirm the validity both of the method – one that is necessarily self-unsettling – and of the poems thus encountered.

This book is a very welcome contribution to the poetics and pragmatics of reading. It shows how it is possible to say what it is that poems do and how this is not the same as saying what they (seem to) say, all the while arguing that another(’s) reading would be a different reading and thus call, perhaps, for another writing.

£48.96, Continuum, May 2010 (208 pages)

ISBN 978-0826424242

Available via the Bookshelf