The Poet's Tomb

The Poet’s Tomb
Martin Corless-Smith

Parlor Press, 2021.
978-1-64317-176-0

The Poet’s Tomb contains five interconnecting essays that explore the idea of consciousness in poetry, tracking work from Anne Carson and Sappho to W.G.Sebald’s and artist Paul Nash’s take on Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall. Using a mixture of contemporary theory, philosophy, poetry, and art, the book explores ideas of the dichotomy of mind and body, determined to locate consciousness (the soul) and the sublime in the deictic articulations of the material. The central essay, The Poet’s Tomb, discusses the fixation of locating a poet’s body as a desire to place the uncanny “living” aspect of the poem in the body of the poet, and eventually in the place of internment. Exploring the work of poets ranging from Virgil to Alice Notley, the essay attempts to unpick the nostalgia for origins of poetic consciousness in the person of the poet and to see poetry as a communal apparatus that provides an exosomatic material realm of consciousness, something akin to Heidegger’s description of language as the house of Being.