Machine generated contents note: All Electrons Are (Not) Alike -- A Little Useless Geometry & Other Matters -- Time Ravel -- Music Is An Oversimplification Of The Situation We Are In -- By The Waters Of Babylon -- Zero, Or Opening Position -- 1.The One Who Counts, Who Paints, Who Buys And Sells -- Zero, The Corrosive Number -- Vanishing Point -- Inventions Of Infinity -- Bank-Money -- Interlude: Cyclops Eye -- 2.What Has Become Of The Subject? -- Bonesetter's Luck: From Zero To Variable -- Vermeer's The Art Of Painting -- I Have Made My Hooke To No Greater Extent Than My Books Has Made Me -- Paper Money -- A Feeling Of Absence -- Interlude: The Pencil I Chew -- 3.Snapshots From The History Of Nothing -- Nothing Is Round -- All Greek To Some Greeks -- Overtaken By Nothingness -- So Its Nothing -- King Lear's Nothing -- Interlude: Thought Provoking Matter -- 4.Absence Of Origin -- Xenomoney: From Promise To Tautology -- Nothing And Its Shadow.
Summary
Driven to Abstraction is Rosmarie Waldrop's sixth collection of poetry with New Directions. The first of its two sections, "Sway-Backed Powerlines," consists of five sequences of lyrical prose poems whose subject matter ranges from voyages of discovery and the U.S. invasion of Iraq to geometry, memories of her father, and the music of John Cage. Part two, the title sequence, explores the ways abstraction has shaped the West, beginning with the Renaissance when zero was introduced in arithmetic, the vanishing point in perspective, and imagery money in economics. These poems are among Waldrop's most engaging and thrilling to date, the lines of a master poet shaping philosophy as poetry and poetry as philosophy. --Book Jacket.
