'Dan Disney's highly original either, Orpheus remakes the villanelle. The 'sound-swarms' in this contemporary 'orphic' work riff laterally on received poetic and and philosophical ideas and incorporate fascinating shreds of thinking and saying. Rainer Maria Rilke and Søren Kierkegaard are the presiding spirits in the volume, and Disney is also in discussion about divergent ways of seeing and understanding with writers from all over the globe. This inventive poetry explores culture, authenticity and translation, and quizzes the lyric modes of apostrophe and song.
– PAUL HETHERINGTON
Dan Disney's either, Orpheus arrives with the force of a tropical weather event to deliver a series of pulsating shocks to the languages of everyday life. Neither strictly poetic nor purely philosophical, these deliriously pedagogical poems summon Rilke, Levertov, Ashbery, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Cage and multitudinous others to reconsider what we thought we knew of authorship, form, religion, phenomenology, and love. For Disney, the proper response to Bloom's anxiety of influence is 'a godless both/and' in which a series of 'elegiac anthroposcenes' transforms the labyrinth of solitude into the kinds of worlds that 'non-residents' might want to inhabit. Hospitable, demanding, festive and fearless, either, Orpheus passes through 'where previously it was not evident that anyone could find a passage.
– FIONA HILE
(Publication summary)
'How does poetry deal with disability? At the level of theme and voice, Australian poetry – including the theorising and criticism of it – has rarely given overt priority to disabled experience. This essay seeks to contribute to a correction of this neglect by adapting the philosophical approach of Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote of the phenomenological preeminence of the Other. It considers how disability – defined expansively as a bodily otherness which also implicates the self – might become apprehended not only within thematic content, but through the disruptions of poetic form.' (Publication abstract)
'How does poetry deal with disability? At the level of theme and voice, Australian poetry – including the theorising and criticism of it – has rarely given overt priority to disabled experience. This essay seeks to contribute to a correction of this neglect by adapting the philosophical approach of Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote of the phenomenological preeminence of the Other. It considers how disability – defined expansively as a bodily otherness which also implicates the self – might become apprehended not only within thematic content, but through the disruptions of poetic form.' (Publication abstract)
