'Omnesia' is Bill Herbert's melding of omniscience and amnesia, the
modern condition of thinking we can know everything about our world
but, in actuality, retaining dangerously little. This doubly
impressive new collection - published in twin editions, the
alternative text and the remix - approaches and evades such flawed
totality. Neither the alternative text nor the remix is the primary
text. They are two variations, doppelgangers haunted by the idea of
a whole neither can embody or know. Readers can read either or both
versions. Booksellers can stock either or both. Only the literary
prize judges will have to read both in order to shortlist either or
both as one. For the past seven years Herbert has wandered from the
Turkic west of China to the barrios of Venezuela; from Tomsk, the
'Athens of Siberia', to the heat of Hargeisa, capital of
Somaliland, an unacknowledged country. These are travels to
translate and, in more than one sense, to be translated; brief
encounters with poets and poetics outside the Eurocentric norm;
looking-glass meetings, omnesiac pilgrimage. Along the fracture
lines between east and west in the Balkans, Greece, and in
Jerusalem, across the cultural gaps that mark the north and south
of the British Isles, Herbert teases out, through tensions between
lyric and satire, English and Scots, formalism and experiment, what
it is we hope to mean by home, integrity, or authenticity.
Herbert's Omnesia is riven by the anxiety of incompletion: it is
two variations desiring to be one theme; doppelgangers haunted by
the idea of a whole neither can embody or know. Which one are you
reading?
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