Available from Contraband Books
Complex Crosses is an experimental critical book which spans the history of poetry by alighting on small fragments. It has a modular form, consisting of commentaries which pursue a dialectical criticism through the idea of the 'complex cross' which is both a figure of dialectic and the action of close reading in which the present's span of attention loops back and through a text.
Hooke's flea (on the book's cover) is seen through a microscope but, in turn, also feeds perhaps on the critic whose close-reading scope is deployed - it's a complex cross in action.
Complex Crosses begins twice, the first time with Homer (the point where an oar becomes a chaff-shovel) and the second time with Horace (where the name of a friend stops the ritual cycle of time). Its returning emphases are on naming, linguistic politics, and how the genre of history interpenetrates that of poetry. It forms a discontinuous line of micro-essays and micro- close readings of these multiple chiasmatic forms.
The essays cover 60 texts including full commentaries of poems by Horace, Shakespeare and Melville. Some of these micro-essays (including early drafts and extra chapters) are posted at Bite the Weeds
Complex Crosses contents page:
Homer / beginning I: total memory / 8th century BC
Horace / beginning II: names of history – dying in time / 23 BC
Rutilius Namatianus / elegiac couplets and shadow / 416
Sedulius / multitude from epic to scripture / early 5th century
Cædmon / mind-kenning / c. 658-680
Otfrid / linguistic icon / c. 870
Exeter Riddle / murder in a word / 960-990
Laȝamon / the syntax of difference / c. 1190-1215
Heldris de Cornuälle / the dialectic of sex – between names / c. 1270-80
Nibelungenlied / event-image and epic / 13th century
Dante / on “alluminar” / c. 1308-1321
Geoffrey Chaucer / “now” and the letter A / c.1383-5
Pearl / neither sun nor moon: heaven as negation / late 14th century
Gawain / self as alliteration / late 14th century
Mandeville / travels in the dictionary / 1400-1425
John Lydgate / unaligned grids / c. 1408
Libelle of Englyshe Policye / “I wolde were on the see” / 1436-7
George Ripley / hieroglyphics / writing as power / 1471
Angelo Poliziano / academia and love / 1483
Juliana Berners / vestiges in the hunt / 1486
Child Ballad 118 / a severed head / spatial names / c. 15th century
Middle English Lyric / spiralling commons / 15th century
Ludovico Ariosto / metaphor and finality of form / 1516
Teofilo Folengo / macaroni the mind / 1517
Pietro Aretino / pronouns and the dialectic of sex / 1527
Girolamo Fracastoro / diction and disease / 1530
Elizabeth / glass citation / 1563
Pierre Ronsard / reflection-line / 1565
Edmund Spenser / grammar of virtue / 1596
Thomas Middleton / two lines: expression as silencing / 1600
William Shakespeare / language engrossed / 1609
Thomas Dekker / whose underworld? / 1612
Michael Drayton / compounds of place / 1622
Equality I: John Donne / “possess one world” / 1633
Phineas Fletcher / chiasmus as vision / 1633
John Aubrey / curled in parenthesis / 1662
John Milton / the metaphysics of simile I / 1667
Abraham Cowley / moral syllables / 1679
John Gay / reversing the negative / 1716
Jonathan Swift / on ‘debtors’, ‘betters’ and ‘letters’ / 1720, 1733
James Grainger / dialectic in plantation pastoral / 1764
William Blake / democratic speech / 1791
Charlotte Smith / semi-colon / bird traps / 1807
E. J. Blandford / violence and subtraction / 1819
John Keats / the speck of writing / 1820
Percy Bysshe Shelley / the metaphysics of simile II / 1820
John Clare / field / “&” / 1832-7
Equality II: W. J. Linton / just enjambement / 1845
Herman Melville / reversing the law / 1866
Lottie Collins / glossolalia and the celebrity of names / 1891
Charles Doughty / senses of the past / 1906
Antonio Machado / manifold landscape / 1912
Tillie Olsen / border capital / labour and line breaks / 1934
Ezra Pound / killing money / 1948
Pier Paolo Pasolini / terza rima in the dead times / 1957
Jorge Luis Borges / wager of the unnameable / 1964
Charles Reznikoff / law, names, knowledge/ 1965
Alison Knowles / modular form / 1967
Denise Riley / soliloquy in a line break / 1993
Derek Walcott / onomatadoxy – naming and existence / 2011
Hooke's flea (on the book's cover) is seen through a microscope but, in turn, also feeds perhaps on the critic whose close-reading scope is deployed - it's a complex cross in action.
Complex Crosses begins twice, the first time with Homer (the point where an oar becomes a chaff-shovel) and the second time with Horace (where the name of a friend stops the ritual cycle of time). Its returning emphases are on naming, linguistic politics, and how the genre of history interpenetrates that of poetry. It forms a discontinuous line of micro-essays and micro- close readings of these multiple chiasmatic forms.
The essays cover 60 texts including full commentaries of poems by Horace, Shakespeare and Melville. Some of these micro-essays (including early drafts and extra chapters) are posted at Bite the Weeds
Complex Crosses contents page:
Homer / beginning I: total memory / 8th century BC
Horace / beginning II: names of history – dying in time / 23 BC
Rutilius Namatianus / elegiac couplets and shadow / 416
Sedulius / multitude from epic to scripture / early 5th century
Cædmon / mind-kenning / c. 658-680
Otfrid / linguistic icon / c. 870
Exeter Riddle / murder in a word / 960-990
Laȝamon / the syntax of difference / c. 1190-1215
Heldris de Cornuälle / the dialectic of sex – between names / c. 1270-80
Nibelungenlied / event-image and epic / 13th century
Dante / on “alluminar” / c. 1308-1321
Geoffrey Chaucer / “now” and the letter A / c.1383-5
Pearl / neither sun nor moon: heaven as negation / late 14th century
Gawain / self as alliteration / late 14th century
Mandeville / travels in the dictionary / 1400-1425
John Lydgate / unaligned grids / c. 1408
Libelle of Englyshe Policye / “I wolde were on the see” / 1436-7
George Ripley / hieroglyphics / writing as power / 1471
Angelo Poliziano / academia and love / 1483
Juliana Berners / vestiges in the hunt / 1486
Child Ballad 118 / a severed head / spatial names / c. 15th century
Middle English Lyric / spiralling commons / 15th century
Ludovico Ariosto / metaphor and finality of form / 1516
Teofilo Folengo / macaroni the mind / 1517
Pietro Aretino / pronouns and the dialectic of sex / 1527
Girolamo Fracastoro / diction and disease / 1530
Elizabeth / glass citation / 1563
Pierre Ronsard / reflection-line / 1565
Edmund Spenser / grammar of virtue / 1596
Thomas Middleton / two lines: expression as silencing / 1600
William Shakespeare / language engrossed / 1609
Thomas Dekker / whose underworld? / 1612
Michael Drayton / compounds of place / 1622
Equality I: John Donne / “possess one world” / 1633
Phineas Fletcher / chiasmus as vision / 1633
John Aubrey / curled in parenthesis / 1662
John Milton / the metaphysics of simile I / 1667
Abraham Cowley / moral syllables / 1679
John Gay / reversing the negative / 1716
Jonathan Swift / on ‘debtors’, ‘betters’ and ‘letters’ / 1720, 1733
James Grainger / dialectic in plantation pastoral / 1764
William Blake / democratic speech / 1791
Charlotte Smith / semi-colon / bird traps / 1807
E. J. Blandford / violence and subtraction / 1819
John Keats / the speck of writing / 1820
Percy Bysshe Shelley / the metaphysics of simile II / 1820
John Clare / field / “&” / 1832-7
Equality II: W. J. Linton / just enjambement / 1845
Herman Melville / reversing the law / 1866
Lottie Collins / glossolalia and the celebrity of names / 1891
Charles Doughty / senses of the past / 1906
Antonio Machado / manifold landscape / 1912
Tillie Olsen / border capital / labour and line breaks / 1934
Ezra Pound / killing money / 1948
Pier Paolo Pasolini / terza rima in the dead times / 1957
Jorge Luis Borges / wager of the unnameable / 1964
Charles Reznikoff / law, names, knowledge/ 1965
Alison Knowles / modular form / 1967
Denise Riley / soliloquy in a line break / 1993
Derek Walcott / onomatadoxy – naming and existence / 2011
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