Comp.

by Kevin Davies

Poetry. Deftly combining toughboy wit with a kind of hyper-awareness of language usually only found in Language poets, Kevin Davies' COMP. is a brilliant and hilarious read. Quoth the man himself--I learned the year after kindergarten that sentences are linguistic artifacts with regulations that fill themselves out, and that for the purposes of our circus-cannon ambitions the most important part of the war they enact is the full-stopping dots that divide the booty amongst camp-following berzerkers of the sub-syllabic frontier. Word.

Genres: Poetry

110 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2000

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Comp." Davies employs language to move, or work, throug the use of parataxis. We experience this in the aperture of the first section, "If you don't believe in science, don't misquote it / / / Just keep staring into that English-language night sky"(1-2) Here we see the use of enjambment and white space to enable a complication of the sentence, both in structure and in content. The lack of belief in science is the lack of belief in reified logic and this void, as we might call it, should not be rendered in the wrong context. Instead of revealing our lack of belief through inarticulate-naieve means, we should continue instead to gaze out into the distance of language, the dark-matter say and the finite but distant stars. It is in that space, "that English-language night sky" that the book will exist in; this is the space we will experience over the course of "Comp."

Indeed over the course of the text there are many simple sentences that don't seem too difficult in and of themselves, however ambiguous: "That's what / it says / here." But at other times we have to deal with the parataxis on a much more difficult level, for instance the structure of the sentence ceases to exist in the entirety of "Untitled Poem From the First Clinton Administration". In this section we read through clauses that are enjambed into each other, each line beginning with a capital letter as a new beginning of sorts while still being autonomous at times and simultaneously dependent on the previous line: "New canine breeds / The litter of domestic mist / One enourmous vascular system"(p83). Is it possible to be a litter and one singular system? It is here where the use of parataxis enables the form of metaphor, and though Davies doesn't anounce to the reader what's about to happen the reader has to maintain the continuity of the line breaks through this section of the book while also recognizing each line as autonomous within the piece. In this way this individual poem, and indeed the entire book, is enabled through with differing potentials on both the micro and the macro level. In treading this distance, a distance we could link to the poetic gap of denotation and connotation, our readerly experience is informed by Davies' "English-language night sky" regardless of how dark or opaque we might initially find it.

[Monet · Rating 1 out of 5]

As someone who loves poetry, I was disappointed

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

totally postmodern, but like in reality.

[Mitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious and exceedingly condensed.

[Anselm · Rating 5 out of 5]

sexually attracted to the head-wound type