Ventriloquise

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2024

And deeper still than this, my eyes penetrate
far into the earth as if it was an agate:
foundations, dungeons, subterranean cities
where thwarted joyance wages its atrocities...
(from 'Dusk: An Antique Song')

Ned Denny's startling new collection recalls what Heidegger says – in his essay on Hölderlin – about the poet, of all mortals, reaching most deeply into the abyss. In what does this abyss, the "world's night," consist? In the fact that the gods have departed, and in the rootless, heaven-proof and now worldwide technocracy forged in their absence. Yet the poet is also the one who sees, in that night, the lost gods' traces, and there are glimpses here "through a veil of names" of nature's saving radiance, of the indestructible delicacy of Claude's last landscape, of a "wild grin of insect glee" just beyond the confines of sleep. As Denny's adept voice 'throws' itself into and through other texts, forms, places, things and times – including works by Heine, classical Chinese poets, Pindar, Ronsard, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Victor Hugo and Lorca – it becomes clear that the fathoming of our iron age is inseparable from the coming dawn.