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Novaless
Paul Valéry wrote that “a poem is a really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words.” Novaless is a device for producing reveries composed of precognitive, poetic thought constructed as a schematic screen of letters and symbols flowing continuously across several axes. Each generation of poets must crack the codes for detecting culturally jammed poetic wavelengths. Like Ray Di Palma’s ur-texts, The Sargasso Transcries and Marquee in the early 70s, Manning’s Novaless permits us to listen directly to these currently camouflaged poetic bandwidths, where strata of definitions, distortions and dreams may be accessed and deciphered, tracing an essential foundational blueprint for future visual/verbal poetic wordscapes.
– Nick Piombino
Nicholas Manning’s gifts of a poetic intelligence and sensibilities are immediately apparent in this diction, this sense of relation and proportion, and overall in the choices he’s made. Here, in Novaless, he sets forth his cosmogony, and it is boundless and it is brilliant, and it is on the tips of our tongues. All things, divine and physical, grammatical and pragmatical, and in line with Theogony and Metamorphoses . . .
– Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
Like stars sending light beyond their time to us, Nicholas Manning’s Novaless reads like a constellation of remnants of geometric form, metaphysical lingo and traditional lyric, making and unmaking voices of these almost-characters, in these practically-places, painted in variable gradations using a vast pallet of colors. In the end, the narrative (mythic, intertextual, anecdotic) defaults to the way these poems function “by reason of their own noise”, as they come at us “in excited semitones” from worlds made and unmade. Languages, history, landscape fold in and over themselves, interjecting, unbalancing, as all the while some ultimate equilibrium – physical, intellectual, global, universal – is sought within the units and disjunct unities of these carefully-wrought verses.
– Jennifer K. Dick
Novaless is “wild reportage” of experience and perception. This serial poem re-visions narrative, delimits boundaries, refracts syntax, weaves languages, and re-imagines punctuation — with “all perfectly attuned”. In this space, we traverse “across * the field * of visions : / the distance of the world its / latitudes and longings / in glowing lines”. Novaless is a luminescent first collection.
– CS Perez
– Nick Piombino
Nicholas Manning’s gifts of a poetic intelligence and sensibilities are immediately apparent in this diction, this sense of relation and proportion, and overall in the choices he’s made. Here, in Novaless, he sets forth his cosmogony, and it is boundless and it is brilliant, and it is on the tips of our tongues. All things, divine and physical, grammatical and pragmatical, and in line with Theogony and Metamorphoses . . .
– Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
Like stars sending light beyond their time to us, Nicholas Manning’s Novaless reads like a constellation of remnants of geometric form, metaphysical lingo and traditional lyric, making and unmaking voices of these almost-characters, in these practically-places, painted in variable gradations using a vast pallet of colors. In the end, the narrative (mythic, intertextual, anecdotic) defaults to the way these poems function “by reason of their own noise”, as they come at us “in excited semitones” from worlds made and unmade. Languages, history, landscape fold in and over themselves, interjecting, unbalancing, as all the while some ultimate equilibrium – physical, intellectual, global, universal – is sought within the units and disjunct unities of these carefully-wrought verses.
– Jennifer K. Dick
Novaless is “wild reportage” of experience and perception. This serial poem re-visions narrative, delimits boundaries, refracts syntax, weaves languages, and re-imagines punctuation — with “all perfectly attuned”. In this space, we traverse “across * the field * of visions : / the distance of the world its / latitudes and longings / in glowing lines”. Novaless is a luminescent first collection.
– CS Perez
160 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2008
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June 14, 2009
WINDOWS INTO A CREATIVE WORLD IN FLUX
‘Among scientists are collectors, classifiers, and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.’ Sir Peter Brian Medawar, The Art of the Soluble
Nicholas Manning’s eloquent, fascinating extended poem Novaless is a refreshingly unique journey into the infinite possibilities that poetry allows. His previous works have been published in journals around the globe and his artistry as a poet is well grounded. Yet in this publication Manning pushes his own wide boundaries into the world of metaphysics: he is exploring through fragments of phrases and repeated ideas and words a matrix upon which the reader can discover individual meanings and create personal stories from the words as tools Manning provides. He sprinkles his pages of this single poem – each page designated by a Roman numeral as though there were a set progression for the reader to follow – with spaces between words, asterisks, forward and backward indicators from the keyboard, and other elements of construction that encourage the insertion of a larger meaning than the essentially romantic meanderings of his narrative.
Some students of poetry will research the word ‘Novaless’, hoping to better understand the challenge before them. Such research may uncover ‘definitions’ of the word as “to be lackluster in performance”, ‘to be impotent either sexually/physically, or sometimes both’. Others may heed Manning’s own subtlety places small parenthetical subtitle (elements towards a metaphysic). Such exercises become futile when the reader opens the mind to the cosmos Nicholas Manning explores in this breathtakingly beautiful work.
CXXIV.
originally
a painful swelling
pustule * for monuments compares
windgall influenced by * a fall
as verb : <as borde by worke ? >>
what
sadness there
is in this * short life ?
<< in it I will not
abide >>
VIII.
the colours
as in my firmament
spread by the sky * lightly …in
light : such coldest passions
this long * winter born
the most searing
press
the skies a rising future
oracity : sheer * opacities
of calico in blue …
<< I need you *
here now
beloved >> tinseled roses
risen * in the rising tunes’s lack
in the darkest of all blooms
long silver lake-bridges
tension’s spectral
shares
shaping the floating
face : << what are you without
me * mirror ? >> … in the stillest
moments : black flowers
of myself?
Reading Nicholas Manning’s symphonic Novaless once is not enough: reading each cluster of words, each line – once – is not enough. It is only when the reader steps into his nebulous space of intellectual and spiritual possibilities that the beauty of this single poem/story/thought/need/joy/pain can be embraced for the magical work that it is. This is the Medawar world of the poet-scientist and the philosopher-scientist, but more important - this is the world of a creative artist exploring the possibilities from the peak of the mountaintop.
Grady Harp
‘Among scientists are collectors, classifiers, and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.’ Sir Peter Brian Medawar, The Art of the Soluble
Nicholas Manning’s eloquent, fascinating extended poem Novaless is a refreshingly unique journey into the infinite possibilities that poetry allows. His previous works have been published in journals around the globe and his artistry as a poet is well grounded. Yet in this publication Manning pushes his own wide boundaries into the world of metaphysics: he is exploring through fragments of phrases and repeated ideas and words a matrix upon which the reader can discover individual meanings and create personal stories from the words as tools Manning provides. He sprinkles his pages of this single poem – each page designated by a Roman numeral as though there were a set progression for the reader to follow – with spaces between words, asterisks, forward and backward indicators from the keyboard, and other elements of construction that encourage the insertion of a larger meaning than the essentially romantic meanderings of his narrative.
Some students of poetry will research the word ‘Novaless’, hoping to better understand the challenge before them. Such research may uncover ‘definitions’ of the word as “to be lackluster in performance”, ‘to be impotent either sexually/physically, or sometimes both’. Others may heed Manning’s own subtlety places small parenthetical subtitle (elements towards a metaphysic). Such exercises become futile when the reader opens the mind to the cosmos Nicholas Manning explores in this breathtakingly beautiful work.
CXXIV.
originally
a painful swelling
pustule * for monuments compares
windgall influenced by * a fall
as verb : <as borde by worke ? >>
what
sadness there
is in this * short life ?
<< in it I will not
abide >>
VIII.
the colours
as in my firmament
spread by the sky * lightly …in
light : such coldest passions
this long * winter born
the most searing
press
the skies a rising future
oracity : sheer * opacities
of calico in blue …
<< I need you *
here now
beloved >> tinseled roses
risen * in the rising tunes’s lack
in the darkest of all blooms
long silver lake-bridges
tension’s spectral
shares
shaping the floating
face : << what are you without
me * mirror ? >> … in the stillest
moments : black flowers
of myself?
Reading Nicholas Manning’s symphonic Novaless once is not enough: reading each cluster of words, each line – once – is not enough. It is only when the reader steps into his nebulous space of intellectual and spiritual possibilities that the beauty of this single poem/story/thought/need/joy/pain can be embraced for the magical work that it is. This is the Medawar world of the poet-scientist and the philosopher-scientist, but more important - this is the world of a creative artist exploring the possibilities from the peak of the mountaintop.
Grady Harp
Displaying 1 of 1 review