Nick Laird's Feel Free Reviewed at The Rumpus

At The Rumpus, Jared Spears reviews Irish poet Nick Laird's 2017 Feel Free, recently released in the U.S. by W.W. Norton. "As Heaney’s poetry did half a century ago, the voice of Feel Free sets the darkness echoing," writes Spears. More:

...As if starting from the perennial question “What can be said of me?” thoughts trace back through memory. [Seamus] Heaney’s notion of self-echo-location is vivified through all the color and nuance of a lived life.

The ode to sensuous experience is offset in “Feel Free” by unfamiliarity, by abstract evocations of “numerous and minute quanta moving very fast in unison.” Hypermodern conundrums jolt the poem from its lulling tone, experiences of everyday reality meet the light of twenty-first century science. Though humanity’s understanding of its place in the universe has fundamentally changed in the past hundred odd years, the language we have for being in the world comes with so much historical baggage. Since Socrates took up the motto “know thyself” (first inscribed on the Oracle at Delphi) as the source of all virtue, a prevailing view in Western thought has insisted that a single self must be there, discoverable and knowable. Philosopher Amia Srinivasan formulated it in just these terms on a BBC Radio 3 panel discussion. Elaborating on this persistence, author and psychotherapist Adam Phillips noted the way in which the very language we use subtly reinforces such conventions. He called it the “very weird fact” that we all know but don’t dwell on: “that psycho-biologically, we’re changing every millisecond of our lives, and yet, our representations in language are remarkably firm.”

It is precisely this tendency in language that Laird’s poetry resists. Feel Free attempts to gaze unflinchingly at the complexities of this reality, wondering what it means to live a life when a single, knowable self simply won’t hold still.

Read the full review at The Rumpus.