Poetry. In Keith Waldrop's THE HOUSE SEEN FROM NOWHERE, we are invited into a meditational drift that explores the 'tense emptiness' of being . The construction of all that surrounds us, the carpentry, wavers between order and the instability of order, is manifest in syntax and etymology. In this house, which is all things-body, fortress, residence, logic, language, mortality-we find mirrors, echoes, and spirits: "the figures light/delineates not/the light itself." Where we might use Zeno's Paradox to understand the relation between the knower and the known, it is in Keith's house that we find the paradox of 'empty distinctions,' a tension between asymmetrical opposites. The house exists "not to inclose but/to include//without redemption."

Author Hometown: Providence, RI USA



About the author: Keith Waldrop is author of numerous collections of poetry and is the translator of The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabes, as well as works by Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach and Jean Grosjean. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and DAAD (Berlin). His titles include HEGEL'S FAMILY, THE OPPOSITE OF LETTING THE MIND WANDER: SELECTED POEMS AND A FEW SONGS, SHIPWRECK IN HAVEN: TRANSCENDENTAL STUDIES, The Balustrade, Light While There is Light, THE LOCALITY PRINCIPLE, ANALOGIES OF ESCAPE and HAUNT. He has twice been nominated for the National Book Award: for his first book of poetry, A Windmill Near Calvary (University of Michigan, 1968); and his most recent, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press, 2009), which won. With his wife Rosmarie Waldrop he co-edits Burning Deck Press. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and teaches at Brown University.