Homo Sentimentalis: A Guide In Verse To Modern Emotional Intimacy
Nicholas Manning
116 pages
Otoliths, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9872010-4-1
$15.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/shop/nicholas-manning/homo-sentimentalis/paperback/product-20166234.html
"In a civilization of hysteria, the sentimental man is king. Troubadoured constructions have laced our European balconies with a string of rotting roses. Emotion’s event horizon is the condensation of cliché. Love is both an autonomous quality of the world and a conditional quality of our language. Extend a convention far enough and one arrives at life. Shall we explore love then as rhetorical device? The flowers among your hair are mere metaphors. Upper limit hyperbole, lower limit litotes. Kitsch and the commonplace set up the steps of the dance. To then trip over tropes is to attain a glittering singularity among stars: a stasis amidst the movement. Rhetoric and sincerity do not cease to be distinguishable; rather, their distinction no longer matters. Beyond the baroque and the rococo lie the limits of this spectrum, where all passion is at once passion and its show, all pathos at once ethos and its mask of Venetian glitter. The aesthetic posture and persona of our over-the-top Romeo takes then to moving while still sobbing in a comical cabriole. Let the tropes dance then, the ones amidst the others, and interchange forever their silken, saddened arms." —Nicholas Manning
Homo Sentimentalis: A Guide In Verse To Modern Emotional Intimacy is probably the greatest single-poet book of love poems in the field of “avant” poetry since For Love, by Robert Creeley. – Kent Johnson
Thanks Tom! Would love to hear your words. I feel a bit like the ship's sailing out, go ye little etc... xoxoxx
ReplyDeleteHi Nick,
ReplyDeleteI just placed an order for your book. Looking forward to plunging into it.
Congratulations.
T