Description
Christopher Norris is a Swansea-based philosopher-poet and Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University who has often read, taught and written about Wittgenstein’s work over many decades. Norris takes seriously Wittgenstein’s assertion that ‘philosophy should only be written as poetry’, but not quite as Wittgenstein intended.
Rather, Norris evokes the most salient traits of Wittgenstein’s writing – aphoristic, metaphorical, cryptically revealing, sometimes koan-like – and treats them in formal (rhyming and metrical) verse which draws out senses subtly or strikingly at odds with received accounts. The result is a sequence of close-focused poetic reflections, engagements, and intertextual dialogues where aspects of Wittgenstein’s work and life-history are passed in sympathetic but critically incisive review.
It will certainly flutter some of the more staid or like-minded academic dovecotes whose coo-filled interiors, as Norris has long maintained, could do with the occasional fluttering. This volume will make a notable addition to Norris’s earlier verse-collections on Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Derrida, and Rilke.
I would highly recommend WHEREOF: poems after Wittgenstein as either as a poetic introduction to Wittgenstein or, for those who know more, a challenge to received notions on Wittgenstein. As this is firstly a collection of poems readers should enjoy most the skilful formal verse.
Jennifer Johnson. Review on London Grip Poetry magazine.
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