Clarity or Death!

Wainwright Jeffrey

"I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me – or else that I didn't live much longer!" Clarity or Death! takes its title from this letter of Wittgenstein's. That desire for clarity in our knowledge of the world, the universe and ourselves is the linking preoccupation of Jeffrey Wainwright's collection. Five poems develop the physicist Richard Feynman's proposition that through scientific study "we may be able to reduce the number of different things". Others ponder infinity and number; the 39-poem sequence "Mere Bagatelle" explores the philosopher Jerry Fodor's assertion that ours is a world "that isn't for anything, a world that is just there", yet one he can still call "austere, tragic, alienated and supremely beautiful".

These poems are both playful and intellectually rigorous, exploring not only ideas but the experience of having and articulating them. They play alongside other aspects of personal experience. Central to Wainwright's writing is a fascination with what Wallace Stevens called "the uncertain light of single, certain truth", an uncertain light embodied in the sensuousness of language given poetic form.

About the Author

Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1944 and was educated locally and at the University of Leeds. He has taught at the University of Wales, Long Island University in Brooklyn and for many years at the Manchester Metropolitan University where he was Professor in the Department of English and its Writing School until 2008.

His first poetry collection was published by Northern House in 1971 and first full book, "Heart's Desire", by Carcanet in 1978. Carcanet Press also publish his "Selected Poems" (1985), "The Red-Headed Pupil" (1994), "Out of the Air" (1999) and "Clarity or Death!" (2008). He has translated plays by Peguy, Claudel and Corneille for BBC Radio 3 and his version of Bernard-Marie Koltes' In the Silence of Cotton Fields was broadcast in March 1999. The play has subsequently been performed by the Actors Touring Company and published by Methuen.

Jeffrey Wainwright has published widely on poetry, including Poetry: "The Basics" (Routledge 2004) and his book on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, "Acceptable Words" (Manchester University Press, 2005).

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