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Go Figure Dr Drew Milne

Go Figure By Dr Drew Milne

Go Figure by Dr Drew Milne


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Summary

This book of lyrics and texts challenges the way numbers prevail over words in art and experience. Providing a radically new poetry of the book and an exhilarating manifesto against maths in art, philosophy and society, Go Figure offers a critique of mathematical reason and a comedy of speculative wit.

Go Figure Summary

Go Figure by Dr Drew Milne

Hamlet famously found himself ill at the numbers of poetry. These poems are no less ill at ease with the metrical or geometrical principles which constrain their movements, though freedom from maths is hard won. While Milne's earlier poems have a reputation for opacity, the aphoristic prose poems which make up 'Aftermaths', the book's concluding afterword, offer a blisteringly explicit account of the book's arguments. Part of the resulting excitement of this new poetic book-form is the tension between the parts that make up the whole. Go Figure's internal resonances thus combine extraordinary levels of refracted or playful poetic detail with direct challenges to the way life, art and society are currently constituted. Through the rubble of capitalism's wars, fetishes and interior decorations, the book seeks figures for what comes after maths. Out of the poetics of everyday life, maths are found wanting, while fragments of a different, more speculative approach are put forward. A variety of mathematical masks, formulae and mysteries are exposed, but the biological tyranny of number-crunching is also found poisoning art and philosophy, from Pythagoras to Heisenberg, and from Achilles to the Beach Boys. Modern art, especially modern poetry, is haunted by the figure of Field Marshal Sir General Reader, the media's universal strategist for inflicting war, viewing figures and sundry axes of nonsense upon the poetics of political dissonance. This figure is here banished along with the soldiers of the Holy Trinity. The stage is set for new figures to go forth and do something other than multiply.

Go Figure Reviews

Original writing must always reinvent its own form if it is not to be part of a genre. Language is used against the grain, words allowed once again to do what they have to do in the circumstances. Milne sometimes summons up a diction from early English, rather as Helen Macdonald does, and the effect is an energising one which echoes the excitement of experimentation from an age when the language was new and wild and felt more malleable. Milne's poems shut nothing down and in this they are truly written for the reader and the world, spangle-toed and smoke akimbo. Beyond mathematics and geometric form in art lies the spirit of recognition. Wisdom sees that justice is more than the sum of sentences and compensation packages: judgment is an art, not mathematical juggling. That art, a political art, an intuitive poetry, is what we find between the covers of 'Go Figure'.

-- Edmund Hardy * Terrible Work *

About Dr Drew Milne

Drew Milne was born in Edinburgh, Scotland 1964. His books include Sheet Mettle (1994), How Peace Came (1994), Songbook (1996), Bench Marks (1998), As It Were (1998), familiars (1999), Pianola (2000) and The Gates of Gaza (2000). He has been a lecturer at the universities of Edinburgh and Sussex, and is the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. He edits Parataxis Editions, and the journal Parataxis: modernism and modern writing.

Table of Contents

  • Go Figure
  • Aftermaths

Additional information

NLS9781844710294
9781844710294
1844710297
Go Figure by Dr Drew Milne
New
Paperback
Salt Publishing
2003-10-01
124
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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Customer Reviews - Go Figure