What do you think?
Rate this book
The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary Poetry
The Dismantling of Time explores the approaches of contemporary poets to the problem of temporality. The book discusses six poets who focus on time as a major theme in their works and who use poetic strategies to overcome its effects.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published February 28, 1988
About the author
Richard Jackson
186 books27 followersLibrarian's note: There is more than one author in the database with this name. Not all books on this profile belong to the same person.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 23, 2008
Richard Jackson, The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary Poetry (U. of Alabama Press, 1988)
Yes, I did finally finish this book. Took me two days shy of nine months to do so, but I did.
It should be no surprise from the title of this work that Richard Jackson is a deconstructionist. All meaning, all perception, is arbitrary. Keeping that in mind, especially in the first sections (where it's not quite so evident), is a very good idea when reading Jackson. Here, he takes the work of six poets and focuses on the way they view time to resolve the seeming paradox of how narrative poetry, which takes place within a specific timeframe, can achieve timelessness.
The easiest way to write this review is to say he succeeds, but harder is to get across exactly how he does that. It strikes me that in creating a book that attempts to resolve the question, he has actually created a different conundrum. As poetry's purpose is to express the inexpressible, Jackson has also expressed the inexpressible in his deconstruction of poetry (which, if course, makes it very hard to express). There isn't necessarily a specific method Jackson uses in his analysis, but he ends up with the feeling that, yes, the question has been answered.
Much is made by one reviewer on the book's jacket about the book's accessibility. Caveat lector. The person writing the blurb has been reading too many academic journals and not enough popular nonfiction, one thinks. The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary Poetry is, arguably, an easier read than most pieces of literary criticism, in that it doesn't require the reader to sit with a dictionary and have to look up three or four words per page. It is still, however, thick writing that requires a great deal of concentration to understand, and from that point of view, it is just as difficult reading as, say, Kristeva's Pouvrirs de l'Horreur or Greimas' Structural Semantics.
A good, solid piece of research for those who like to go below the surface of their poetry. *** ½
Yes, I did finally finish this book. Took me two days shy of nine months to do so, but I did.
It should be no surprise from the title of this work that Richard Jackson is a deconstructionist. All meaning, all perception, is arbitrary. Keeping that in mind, especially in the first sections (where it's not quite so evident), is a very good idea when reading Jackson. Here, he takes the work of six poets and focuses on the way they view time to resolve the seeming paradox of how narrative poetry, which takes place within a specific timeframe, can achieve timelessness.
The easiest way to write this review is to say he succeeds, but harder is to get across exactly how he does that. It strikes me that in creating a book that attempts to resolve the question, he has actually created a different conundrum. As poetry's purpose is to express the inexpressible, Jackson has also expressed the inexpressible in his deconstruction of poetry (which, if course, makes it very hard to express). There isn't necessarily a specific method Jackson uses in his analysis, but he ends up with the feeling that, yes, the question has been answered.
Much is made by one reviewer on the book's jacket about the book's accessibility. Caveat lector. The person writing the blurb has been reading too many academic journals and not enough popular nonfiction, one thinks. The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary Poetry is, arguably, an easier read than most pieces of literary criticism, in that it doesn't require the reader to sit with a dictionary and have to look up three or four words per page. It is still, however, thick writing that requires a great deal of concentration to understand, and from that point of view, it is just as difficult reading as, say, Kristeva's Pouvrirs de l'Horreur or Greimas' Structural Semantics.
A good, solid piece of research for those who like to go below the surface of their poetry. *** ½
Displaying 1 of 1 review