Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination

by Andrea Brady

WILDFIRE is a verse essay. It is trying to persuade us, to recognize that certain catastrophes and felicities are not inevitable. It concerns the history of incendiary devices, of the evolution of Greek fire from a divine secret which could sustain or destroy empires, into white phosphorus and napalm; the elliptical fires of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle's service to Alexander in the fashioning of pyrotechnics, the burning/blooming/mating bodies of G. H. Schubert and the self-feeding crowds of Elias Canetti; mechanisms to project fire, to make it burn on water and stick to wood and skin, to keep it off the walls of the besieged towns, and what those mechanisms (projection and defense) have done to geometry; the courts of fire, the legal chamber and the hortus conclusus, and the margins of ambiguity where it is lobbed with impunity; embedded nuggets and embedded reporters, the discovery of the chemical element, industrial tragedy, the resistance of the matchgirls at Bryant & May, the corruption of Quaker capitalists, washing powder and toothpaste. It is an etiology of metaphors, "shake-n-bake" and whisky pete and phantom fury. It is also an argument about obscurity and illumination: WILDFIRE does both, smokes the bright air and singes the night with trajectories. And so an interrogation of writing practices which fume as much as they enlighten.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Andrea Brady is an American poet and lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She studied at Columbia University and the University of Cambridge. Her academic work focuses on contemporary poetry and the early modern period. She is the curator of the Archive of the Now and the co-editor (with Keston Sutherland) of Barque Press.

Reviews

[Callum Morris-Horne · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 rounded up. An epic and pyrotechnic poem or ‘verse essay’; a sort of transhistorical, transcultural biography of fire in all its forms. Very difficult and obscure, even impenetrable, but (mercifully) there are detailed footnotes. No idea what was happening for 95% of it, but decent vibes.

[Frank Karioris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truthfully, this went way over my head. Stars shone through my eyes.