Ventriloquise

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2024 And deeper still than this, my eyes penetrate far into the earth as if it was an agate: foundations, dungeons, subterranean cities where thwarted joyance wages its atrocities... (from 'Dusk: An Antique Song') Ned Denny's startling new collection recalls what Heidegger says – in his essay on Hölderlin – about the poet, of all mortals, reaching most deeply into the abyss. In what does this abyss, the "world's night," consist? In the fact that