Either, Orpheus

Dan Disney’s highly original either, Orpheus remakes the villanelle. The ‘sound-swarms’ in this contemporary ‘orphic’ work riff laterally on received poetic and philosophical ideas and incorporate fascinating shreds of thinking and saying. Rainer Maria Rilke and Soren Kierkegaard are the presiding spirits in the volume, and Disney is also in discussion about divergent ways of seeing and understanding with writers from all over the globe. This inventive poetry explores culture, authenticity and translation, and quizzes the lyric modes of apostrophe and song. - Paul Hetherington

Dan Disney’s either, Orpheus arrives with the force of a tropical weather event to deliver a series of pulsating shocks to the languages of everyday life. Neither strictly poetic nor purely philosophical, these deliriously pedagogical poems summon Rilke, Levertov, Ashbery, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Cage and multitudinous others to reconsider what we thought we knew of authorship, form, religion, phenomenology and love. For Disney, the proper response to Bloom’s anxiety of influence is ‘a godless both/and’ in which a series of ‘elegiac anthroposcenes’ transforms the labyrinth of solitude into the kinds of worlds that we ‘non-residents’ might want to inhabit. Hospitable, demanding, festive and fearless, either, Orpheus passes through ‘where previously it was not evident that anyone could find a passage . - Fiona Hile