'Written over a period of two decades, The Law of Poetry contains poems that pay personal tributes to ‘things’—broccoli, ducks and concrete—as well as poems that seek to physically enter the realm of abstract concepts —chance, kindness and explanations. Set out in alphabetical order—as if a dictionary of essences—each poem is titled ‘The Law of Something’, be that ‘The Law of Absolutes’, ‘The Law of the Child, Lost’ or ‘The Law of Rubber Gloves’. The reader is asked not to judge—as law stereotypically demands—but to engage with this very idiosyncratic world of the individual poet and to be injected, like the shrunken travellers in the 1966 classic, Fantastic Voyage, into the nervous system of another.' (Publication summary)
Dedication:
for
Regina Graycar
&
Dirk Meure
'Each title and topic references law in some way, so the first-time reader may be intimidated by the regulatory tone before finding that there are delightful laws for broccoli and rubber gloves between weightier treatments of love and the passage of time. Law evokes perceptions of truth and consequence in the sciences as well, and while a glum magistrate may have cast his veto in the Senate, Pliny the Elder was across town compiling his Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia not so different from The Law of Poetry. While Rome stamped its brand of law on justice and the stars, something corrosive was stirring in its roots.' (Publication abstract)
'Each title and topic references law in some way, so the first-time reader may be intimidated by the regulatory tone before finding that there are delightful laws for broccoli and rubber gloves between weightier treatments of love and the passage of time. Law evokes perceptions of truth and consequence in the sciences as well, and while a glum magistrate may have cast his veto in the Senate, Pliny the Elder was across town compiling his Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia not so different from The Law of Poetry. While Rome stamped its brand of law on justice and the stars, something corrosive was stirring in its roots.' (Publication abstract)
