The sentiment of the title and the collection itself originates in a story about the great Andalusian Sufi master Ibn al Arabi. One of his adepts—adepts are called dervishes—asked the great master, What is the job of the dervish? To disappear, replied Ibn al Arabi. To disappear into the o of not? His answer might recall the anonymous medieval masterpiece, The Cloud of Unknowing. You remove yourself like a pair of old socks and step into the abyss, nameless, data-less, and there you find the great oneness of the universe, that oneness that so frightens the cowering nationalists and their childish supremacist notions. Swanwick gets it, and he conveys it to you here. He invites you to savor each phrase, each sentence, each stanza. He calls no attention to himself and thereby reflects the very spirit of the poems and Ibn al Arabi's response to his dervish. Dervish, by the way, is a word much maligned by our anglocentric and imperialist worldview if only because the British in their exploitive conquest of Sudan were nearly annihilated by a self-appointed mahdi's dervishes. As the British told the story those followers were crazed fanatics. They certainly were high on their particular interpretation of Islam's mystical tradition, but they were by no means the kind of dervishes who followed Ibn al Arabi. The poems in this particular book were conscious of the role of silence in any word, any collection of words. The crucial, indispensable role of silence. And Swanwick's reading is imbued with this recognition. The poems teeter on the edge of unknowing, not saying anything at all, because anything we say endangers our mystical journey into the unknowing which ultimately is the only context in which we can be truly known. That's the paradox, that what we say, what we create ties our shoes together and we stumble.
The sentiment of the title and the collection itself originates in a story about the great Andalusian Sufi master Ibn al Arabi. One of his adepts—adepts are called dervishes—asked the great master, What is the job of the dervish? To disappear, replied Ibn al Arabi. To disappear into the o of not? His answer might recall the anonymous medieval masterpiece, The Cloud of Unknowing. You remove yourself like a pair of old socks and step into the abyss, nameless, data-less, and there you find the great oneness of the universe, that oneness that so frightens the cowering nationalists and their childish supremacist notions. Swanwick gets it, and he conveys it to you here. He invites you to savor each phrase, each sentence, each stanza. He calls no attention to himself and thereby reflects the very spirit of the poems and Ibn al Arabi's response to his dervish. Dervish, by the way, is a word much maligned by our anglocentric and imperialist worldview if only because the British in their exploitive conquest of Sudan were nearly annihilated by a self-appointed mahdi's dervishes. As the British told the story those followers were crazed fanatics. They certainly were high on their particular interpretation of Islam's mystical tradition, but they were by no means the kind of dervishes who followed Ibn al Arabi. The poems in this particular book were conscious of the role of silence in any word, any collection of words. The crucial, indispensable role of silence. And Swanwick's reading is imbued with this recognition. The poems teeter on the edge of unknowing, not saying anything at all, because anything we say endangers our mystical journey into the unknowing which ultimately is the only context in which we can be truly known. That's the paradox, that what we say, what we create ties our shoes together and we stumble.
Marbrook’s metaphysical poetry