"Neither Wit Nor Gold" (from Then)

Résumé du livre

While putting together a manuscript of work written between 1975-1990, Alcalay became dissatisfied with the notion of a "selected poems." As a response, he began to comb through photographs, correspondence, memorabilia, journal entries, and newspaper clippings from the era, and incorporated them into his book; the result is a personal investigation into the relationships of context to text, memory to nostalgia, and present attention to the multiple traces of the past. "He approaches his experience as if it were somebody else's. He takes his own poetry, his own notebooks, and his own diaries as documentary evidence of another person's life and therefore presents them as the index of a different, never-quite-forgotten world."-David Kaufmann, The Tablet