The world and its streets, places

In Eigner, the desire to know anchors itself in the discrete particular, recording sense data in an empiricism derived from Williams, Pound, and Olson, then stretches itself by a series of shifts of attention, to create an arching figure for knowledge. The shapes those figures take are products of an insistent, restless movement on the one hand, and on the other a refusal to compromise the harvest of the moment by subordinating it to any totalizing statement. Thus the dialectical movement of the poems is made possible by an openness to embrace the manifest, contingent phenomena of temporal existence and a willingness of mind to release its hold at any point. The truth of the mortality of the subject is thus built into its appropriation of the world. -Kit Robinson