Knots
Description
The mind is made / of pleasures and / uncertainty, inviting / as it yearns to be both / puzzle and adversity Full of philosophical digressions, questions, and answers, Knots forms a series of cyclical narrations, a kind of verbal asymmetry or mathematician’s knot, continuously mirroring its ideas and subject matter in a play of language and contrasting points of view. "Flight of the Mind & Measure of the Stars" sets an itinerary and series of proposed directions for the book, its poems introducing the mind in action, laying down themes of art and memory, reason and belief, intimacy and desire. The final sections are composed of verses that can also be read as parts of two longer, interconnected poems. "The Occupied Mind" enticingly pulls us deeper into philosophical questions and answers about the needs of the mind and the ambiguities of love. The central conceit of "Minutes" offers sixty meditations that are both a measure of time and testimony, as well as a witnessing and confession of what takes place within a changing relationship. Confronting the riddles and dualities of mind and heart, Knots provokes a layered interplay of reason, paradox, code, and cipher from our daily thinking and feeling. Actively engaging with the spoken strategies of thought, the nature of art, and our always unpredictable, evolving experience of love, we quickly discover the mind and heart are rarely what we expect.
Reviews
“Edward Carson’s Knots is tied somewhere between cerebral and emotional knowing. This is a philosophical and quizzical look into digressions. Both question and answer, Knots is a text concerned primarily with paradoxes, riddles, and dualities. While matters of a buzzing mind carry the weight of poetics, a consequence of gravity and memory, Knots enlarges a wayward heart. [It] will orient and re-orient readers, dizzying in universal delights and poetry’s auspicious nature.” Montreal Review of Books