Dark Waves and Light Matter: Essays - Hardcover

Goldbarth, Albert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820321265 ISBN 13: 9780820321264

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 1999

Synopsis

Albert Goldbarth’s personal essays are known for their marriage of poetically rich language with research into intriguingly arcane corners of our culture. “Goldbarth is a master mixer,” says the Village Voice, and the New York Times Book Review calls his prose “an artful joining of disparate entities into something new that illuminates as it entertains.”

Dark Waves and Light Matter is an energetic, eclectic gathering of Goldbarth’s recent essays. They are part meditations and part short stories, part scholarship and part downright sassiness. A paean to 1950s comic book villains leads, through a visit with Charles Dickens, to a contemplation on the unity of the first day of Creation. Agatha Christie, Timothy Leary, and Pieter Brueghel all contribute equally to a consideration of how the unity of our lives is perforated by tiny moments of disjunction. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wizard of Oz, and the National Enquirer unlock a study of patricide and UFOlogy.

These essays look squarely at large, tough, all-encompassing ideas, but they don’t ignore the small specifics that multiply into a day, for example, one “lone orchid pressed into an album; its oils have long past stained the paper around it translucent, a wimple of spectral sheen.”

Annie Dillard has said that Goldbarth’s prose is “lively, brilliant, vivid, witty, and informed,” and Dark Waves and Light Matter triumphantly confirms this assessment.

About this title

About the Author:

ALBERT GOLDBARTH is widely heralded as one of the most creative voices in contemporary American literature. His work frequently appears in the pages of the New Yorker, the Nation, Harper’s, and the major literary reviews. Over the past two decades, he has published nearly two dozen volumes of poems and essays, including Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (Georgia), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. He has also been a Guggenheim Fellow, the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Goldbarth is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wichita State University.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A collection of poet Goldbarth's (Jan. 31, 1974, etc.) previously published essays which burst into the black night like an explosion of firecrackers: eruptions of color and jazz riffs of language that ultimately fade to nothing. Moments of pure brilliance punctuate these ten essays, each a tribute and a rhapsody to the questions and conditions of being human. Sometimes Goldbarth's language is so right, so exact, with the English language at its most scintillating, sharp, and lapidary. The whole effect, though, of these pastiches becomes the vicarious, voyeuristic, and empty pleasure of witnessing the author's masturbatory revels: oh, how he impresses himself (and you, too, dear reader!) with his stratospheric lexicon and compendium of fascinating trivia. His erudition is unquestionable (as attested by his encyclopedic knowledge of comic book villains, all fictional characters who happen to be green, and his laundry list of important events of 1913), but the mishmash which results from this eclectic collection of trivia only blinds and hides the moments of humanity and compassion which should be the book's core. Essays which probe the nature of time and memory, the fractured essence of identity, and the real potential for human obsolescence become mired in the extended conceits he draws about them: the whirlwinds of details and trivia surrounding his metaphors eventually overcome the real subjects of the essays. The end result stands, not as an investigation into the human condition, but paradoxically, as a shield against it. If heady wordplay and postmodern pastiche were sufficient ingredients for meaningful existential enquiry, these essays would stand as monumental achievements; unfortunately, they are limp and lifeless lumps drowned in their own syrup of superficiality. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0820321265
• ISBN 13: 9780820321264
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192