Omnesia: remix

by W.N. Herbert

"Omnesia" is Bill Herbert's melding of omniscience and amnesia, the modern condition of thinking we can know everything about our world but, in actuality, retaining dangerously little. This doubly impressive new collection - published in twin editions, the alternative text and the remix - approaches and evades such flawed totality. Neither the alternative text nor the remix is the primary text. They are two variations, doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Readers can read either or both versions. Booksellers can stock either or both. Only the literary prize judges will have to read both in order to shortlist either or both as one. For the past seven years Herbert has wandered from the Turkic west of China to the barrios of Venezuela; from Tomsk, the 'Athens of Siberia', to the heat of Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland, an unacknowledged country. These are travels to translate and, in more than one sense, to be translated; brief encounters with poets and poetics outside the Eurocentric norm; looking-glass meetings, omnesiac pilgrimage. Along the fracture lines between east and west in the Balkans, Greece, and in Jerusalem, across the cultural gaps that mark the north and south of the British Isles, Herbert teases out, through tensions between lyric and satire, English and Scots, formalism and experiment, what it is we hope to mean by home, integrity, or authenticity. Herbert's Omnesia is riven by the anxiety of it is two variations desiring to be one theme; doppelgangers haunted by the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Which one are you reading?

Genres: Poetry, Ebooks

173 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2013

About the author

W.N. Herbert FRSL (b. 1961) is a Scottish poet. He writes in both English and Scots. He and Richard Price founded the poetry magazine Gairfish. He currently teaches at Newcastle University.

Herbert was educated at Grove Academy and then studied Brasenose College, Oxford, becoming a Doctor of Philosophy in 1992 after completing a thesis on the work of Hugh MacDiarmid.

In 1994, he was Writer-in-Residence for Morayshire and one of 20 poets chosen by a panel of judges as the New Generation in a promotion organised by the Poetry Society. He was one of the writers involved in the Informationist poetry movement that emerged in Scotland in the 1990s.

In September 2013, Herbert was appointed as Dundee's first makar.

Reviews

[Mugren Ohaly · Rating 1 out of 5]

These poems are written in either English or Scots.
The English ones have too many rhymes, making it sound forced. And the Scots poems sound interesting, but I'd need a translator to fully understand them.

[scarlettraces · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven't read the Remix, and I think I need to to understand how this collection works. It didn't fry my brain but maybe that's because as a standalone this is a fraction of the wattage?