Poetry

The Most Difficult Area

The Book

1968

Poetry
24,5 x 16,8 cm
43 pages
Softcover
ISBN10: 978-0206615031
London: Cape Goliard.

Kenneth White believes with Nietzsche that civilization’s crying need is ‘temporary isolation, a kind of deepest concentration on oneself and self-recovery — not to avoid temptations, but obligations’. He has avoided the great thoroughfares of modern life and lived, simply, on its fringes. His concern with ‘a living relationship to things’, in which he feels a kinship with Chinese mystics and Celtic visionaries, enables him to travel his chosen territory with ever-renewed freshness of vision. This second book of Kenneth White’s verse follows The Cold Wind of Dawn and the prose volume Letters from Gourgounel.

Publisher’s presentation

Extract

Bird and Mammal

1.

Nietzsche

perched high, very high

in the cold air

and the flames of the sun

perched high

squawking in all directions

trying to find out where to go

2.

Walt Whitman

padding along an eternal shore

lolling in voluptuous tides

the sun on his bare brown shoulders

paddind along an eternal shore

bellowing

in sheer contentment